The Perfect Wisdom of the Heart Sutra

I've been told time and time again about the power of the Heart Sutra.

Here is the story of the Heart Sutra:

Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva, when practicing deeply the Perfect Wisdom clearly saw that all five Skandhas are empty and passed beyond all suffering.

Sariputra, form does not differ from emptiness: Emptiness does not differ from form. Form then is emptiness. Emptiness then is form. Sensation, perception, volition, and consciousness, are also like this.

Sariputra, all Dharmas are marked with emptiness: not born and not dying, not stained and not pure, not gaining and not losing. Therefore, in emptiness there is no form, no sensation, perception, volition or consciousness. No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body or mind; nor form, sound, smell, taste, touch, or Dharmas; no realm of sight 'til we come to no realm of consciousness; no ignorance and no ending of ignorance, 'til we come to no old age and death, and no ending of old age and death. No suffering, origination, extinction, or path. No wisdom, and no attainment, with nothing to attain.

Because the Bodhisattva is the Perfect Wisdom of emptiness, his mind has no hindrance. Having no hindrance, there is no fear and far from all fantasy, he is dwelling in Nirvana.

Because all Buddhas of the three times practice the wisdom of emptiness, they gain complete and perfect enlightenment.

Therefore know, that Perfect Wisdom, is the great holy mantra, the great bright mantra, the wisdom mantra, the unequaled mantra, which can destroy all suffering---truly real and not false. So he gave the Perfect Wisdom mantra, which goes;

Ga te Ga te,
Pa ra Ga te,
Pa ra sam Ga te,
Bod hi Sva ha.

Meaning:
Gone, gone
Gone beyond.
Gone completely beyond,
Praise to awakening.

To receive the blessings of the Heart Sutra, chant it for 3, 7 or many times, and then dedicate the merits to someone. A friend, yourself, your family. Just remember not to use any negative words in the prayer.

Sounds crazy, I know; I'm just writing what I've been told. For example, wishing someone to be healthy is much more effective than wishing someone not to be sick, because the word "sick" is negative and the mind may linger on that word, thus sending out negative vibrations.

Here is an example dedication:

I want to dedicate this merit to my husband so that he will have more compassion and wisdom, thus he and I can have a harmonious relationship. Also, I want to dedicate this merit to myself so that I can be healthy and happy.

You can also dedicate the merits to all the beings that you have been indebted to in your past lives and this life, because we all make mistakes and (sometimes intentionally, other times unintentionally) hurt other people along the way.

This is an example of such a dedication:

I also want to dedicate this merit to all the beings whom I was indebted to in my past lives and this life, so that they can have more compassion and wisdom, and a happy and auspicious life. I always say that right after my morning chanting of the Medicine Buddha Sutra and Heart Sutra. I also dedicate the merit to my family members. relatives, friends, and my patients of past lives and this life, so that they can have more compassion and wisdom, and a happy and auspicious life.

Let me know if you try this and if you see any changes in your life!

Boss Hog

The gorging that is Thanksgiving that made me think of this...

When I last wrote about Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, I neglected to mention Jeff Tietz's horrifying article about modern pork production, "Boss Hog" posted December 2006 on Rolling Stone online.

I won't go into details but trust me when I say that after reading this article I could not eat pork for weeks.

Okay I'll post just the first paragraph:

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That's a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

That's just the start. It gets much worse. Very eye-opening.

Spiritual Cinema Circle - Validation

Not related to books or reading....

Click here to watch a cute uplifting short film, courtesy of Spiritual Cinema Circle.

It's called "Validation" as in parking validation...

Marry Him!

Reading Caitlin Flanagan's recent article in the Atlantic about being reminded of female adolescence, re-reading Lisa Belkin’s October 2003 New York Times Magazine cover story about highly educated women choosing to leave their careers for the joys of motherhood, and recent conversations with friends have reminded me of another interesting article published in the Atlantic: "Marry Him!" by Lori Gottlieb (March 2008).

This is an essay by a self-proclaimed feminist making the case for settling:

My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It’s hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who’s changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)

Obviously, I wasn’t always an advocate of settling. In fact, it took not settling to make me realize that settling is the better option, and even though settling is a rampant phenomenon, talking about it in a positive light makes people profoundly uncomfortable. Whenever I make the case for settling, people look at me with creased brows of disapproval or frowns of disappointment, the way a child might look at an older sibling who just informed her that Jerry’s Kids aren’t going to walk, even if you send them money. It’s not only politically incorrect to get behind settling, it’s downright un-American. Our culture tells us to keep our eyes on the prize (while our mothers, who know better, tell us not to be so picky), and the theme of holding out for true love (whatever that is—look at the divorce rate) permeates our collective mentality.

...

What I didn’t realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems like an enormous act of resignation when you’re looking at it from the vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge and do it, you’ll probably be relatively content. It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.

I don’t mean to say that settling is ideal. I’m simply saying that it might have gotten an undeservedly bad rap. As the only single woman in my son’s mommy-and-me group, I used to listen each week to a litany of unrelenting complaints about people’s husbands and feel pretty good about my decision to hold out for the right guy, only to realize that these women wouldn’t trade places with me for a second, no matter how dull their marriages might be or how desperately they might long for a different husband. They, like me, would rather feel alone in a marriage than actually be alone, because they, like me, realize that marriage ultimately isn’t about cosmic connection—it’s about how having a teammate, even if he’s not the love of your life, is better than not having one at all.

...

A number of my single women friends admit (in hushed voices and after I swear I won’t use their real names here) that they’d readily settle now but wouldn’t have 10 years ago. They believe that part of the problem is that we grew up idealizing marriage—and that if we’d had a more realistic understanding of its cold, hard benefits, we might have done things differently. Instead, we grew up thinking that marriage meant feeling some kind of divine spark, and so we walked away from uninspiring relationships that might have made us happy in the context of a family.

All marriages, of course, involve compromise, but where’s the cutoff? Where’s the line between compromising and settling, and at what age does that line seem to fade away? Choosing to spend your life with a guy who doesn’t delight in the small things in life might be considered settling at 30, but not at 35. By 40, if you get a cold shiver down your spine at the thought of embracing a certain guy, but you enjoy his company more than anyone else’s, is that settling or making an adult compromise?

It's worth reading the whole article, but above I've pasted what I think are Gottlieb's main arguments.

Over the last decade, I have come to believe that we (women) have been fed this unrealistic idea of fairy tale marriages and true love and soul mates (largely due to the way relationships are portrayed on television, movies, and even in books).

I love a good romantic comedy (Love Actually is one of my all-time favorite movies) as much as the next girl. And I don't necessarily advocate settling.

I just think that many women (and some men) would benefit from some serious thought and discussion about what really makes a good marriage.

Also worth reading are these articles also available on the Atlantic online:

• "The Case for Mr. Not-Quite Right" by Sarah Lipka (February 19, 2008)
• "In Search of Mr. Right" by Sage Stossel (December 27, 2002)
• "How Do I Love Thee?" by Lori Gottlieb (March 2006)

Okay, maybe I do advocate settling...

Mind and Life: Discussions with the Dalai Lama on the Nature of Reality

As I've mentioned before, I'm subscribed to the Mind & Life Institute mailing list, and through this list I just received an email about a new book:

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new book that captures the rich exchange between scientists and Buddhist contemplatives during a Mind and Life Institute Dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. When a group of noted scientists including Nobel physicist Steven Chu and biologist Eric Lander discussed the nature of matter, life and everything from particle physics to the evolution and nature of consciousness with the Dalai Lama at his home in Dharamsala, their dialogue was recorded for posterity.

The book that grew out of this meeting of minds is Mind and Life: Discussions with the Dalai Lama on the Nature of Reality by Pier Luigi Luisi and Zara Houshmand. Recently released by Columbia University Press, the book has already received an appreciative review by the journal Nature, which notes that Luisi, "does a fine job of capturing the ebb and flow of debate and the delicate dynamics of cross-cultural interaction ... The book is stimulating whatever your field of expertise, because it is likely to offer a way of looking at the world that you had not tried."

You can read the book review in Nature at: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v456/n7219/full/456170a.html

In case you don't already know, for over a decade, a small group of scientists and philosophers (and practitioners of many faiths, all members of the Mind and Life Institute) have met about once a year to explore the intersection between science and the spirit. This book came out of one of those conferences.

Don't think I will purchase this book, at least not yet, but I would like to learn more about it.

I understand that in addition to interviews with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, included in this book are also interviews with Matthieu Ricard and Richard Gere. I'm not too interested in the interviews with Gere but The Monk & the Philosopher: Father & Son Discuss the Meaning of Life by Jean-Francois Revel & Matthieu Ricard (which I read in 2004) is one of my favorite books. Of the Dalai Lama's books, I've read The Heart of the Buddha’s Path and just a few others and I would love to read more from him.

Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker

Finally finished reading Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (click here to view all my posts about this book).

While this book was educational, it was also a bit too depressing for my taste. It was quite smart of Greenhouse to put his chapter about the companies that treat their workers well (chapter nine, Taking the High Road) where he did; if it had been any later I was considering not finishing this book.

And I pretty much always finish a book I start.

I was relieved when I finally got to chapter sixteen, Lifting All Boats, with Greenhouse's recommendations categorized as follows:

• fighting wage stagnation
• cracking down on wage theft
• safeguarding the safety net
• curing an unhealthy health care system
• increasing retirement security
• putting some movement back into the labor movement
• grappling with globalization
• easing the climb upward
• respect as a remedy

So my final thoughts....this book is good. I'm glad I read it. But if you aren't used to hearing about terrible working conditions and wages, be prepared to be sad.

What Girls Want

I haven't seen Twilight nor have I read any of the books. After reading Caitlin Flanagan's December 2008 Atlantic article "What Girls Want" describing this series of vampire novels as a reflection of young adolescent girls' longings and desires, I am suddenly reminded of what it was like to be a young girl. Flanagan writes:

The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.

And I suppose that time in my life is when I fell in love with books and reading. Flanagan writes later:

One of the signal differences between adolescent girls and boys is that while a boy quickly puts away childish things in his race to initiate a sexual life for himself, a girl will continue to cherish, almost to fetishize, the tokens of her little-girlhood. She wants to be both places at once—in the safety of girl land, with the pandas and jump ropes, and in the arms of a lover, whose sole desire is to take her completely. And most of all, as girls work all of this out with considerable anguish, they want to be in their rooms, with the doors closed and the declarations posted. The biggest problem for parents of teenage girls is that they never know who is going to come barreling out of that sacred space: the adorable little girl who wants to cuddle, or the hard-eyed young woman who has left it all behind.

Okay, I'll admit it. I am very seriously considering reading The Twilight Saga books. Flanagan describes the series as a true story of teenage love:

The Twilight series is not based on a true story, of course, but within it is the true story, the original one. Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven’t seen that tale in a girls’ book in a very long time. And it’s selling through the roof.

This isn't to say that I miss being a teenager. I'd hardly call it the best time of my life. But it was a wonderful time when all things were possible, responsibilities were few, and we were too naive to believe the cold hard truth of the world.

And Flanagan's January/February 2006 article "Are You There God? It's Me, Monica" (linked from the article about Twilight) about the rumored oral sex craze in teenagers today is shocking. I was so innocent in my teen years. So were most of my friends. My how times have changed.

The Opt-Out Revolution

After reading what Steven Greenhouse has to say about Lisa Belkin's October 2003 New York Times Magazine cover story titled "The Opt-Out Revolution" I decided to take a break from reading The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker and re-read this article about highly successful Princeton-educated women leaving their careers to raise families.

I remember when I first read it when it was published and feeling for the first time that my own belief that success should be defined by joyfulness and a happy family (and not by one's accomplishments and career) was perhaps shared by other educated women.

It was such a relief.

Anyway, it was good to re-read this article. Now back to reading The Big Squeeze.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle Discussion Questions

A few days ago, I finished the latest selection from my book club: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel by David Wroblewski.

Quite a powerful story. I recommend this book and I definitely suggest, as many others have, that you do not read anything about the book (especially not the inside cover) before starting the book. The inside cover gives a basic (but thorough) summary of the entire story.

If you have read the book, take a look at some of the author's discussion questions (warning, spoilers):

1. How would Edgar's story have been different if he had been born with a voice? How would Edgar himself have been different? Since Edgar can communicate perfectly well in sign most of the time, why should having a voice make any difference at all?
2. At one point in this story, Trudy tells Edgar that what makes the Sawtelle dogs valuable is something that cannot be put into words, at least by her. By the end of the story, Edgar feels he understands what she meant, though he is equally at a loss to name this quality. What do you think Trudy meant?
3. How does Almondine's way of seeing the world differ from the human characters in this story? Does Essay's perception (which we can only infer) differ from Almondine's? Assuming that both dogs are examples of what John Sawtelle dubbed canis posterus, "the next dogs", what specifically can they do that other dogs cannot?
4. In what ways have dog training techniques changed in the last few decades? Do Edgar's own methods change over the course of the story? If so, why? Do different methods of dog training represent a trade-off of some kind, or are certain methods simply better? Would it be more or less difficult to train a breed of dogs that had been selected for many generations for their intellect?
5. Haunting is a prominent motif in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. How many ghosts, both literal and figurative, are in this story? In what ways are the ghosts alike? Who is haunted, and by whom?
6. One of the abiding mysteries in Edgar's life concerns how his parents met. In fact, Edgar is an inveterate snoop about it. Yet when Trudy finally offers to tell him, he decides he'd rather not know. What does that reveal about Edgar's character or his state of mind? Do you think he might have made a different decision earlier in the story?
7. At first glance, Henry Lamb seems an unlikely caretaker for a pair of Sawtelle dogs, yet Edgar feels that Tinder and Baboo will be safe with him. What is it about Henry that makes him fit? Would it have been better if Edgar had placed the dogs with someone more experienced? Why doesn't Edgar simply insist that all the dogs return home with him?
8. Claude is a mysterious presence in this story. What does he want and when did he start wanting it? What is his modus operandi? Would his methods work in the real world, or is such behavior merely a convenient trope of fiction? Two of the final chapters are told from Claude's point of view. Do they help explain his character or motivation?
9. In one of Edgar's favorite passages from The Jungle Book, Bagheera tells Mowgli that he was once a caged animal, until "one night I felt that I was Bagheera - the Panther - and no man's plaything, and I broke the silly lock with one blow of my paw and came away." There is a dialectic in Edgar's story that is similarly concerned with the ideas of wildness and domestication. How does this manifest itself? What is the "wildest" element in the story? What is the most "domestic"?
10. Mark Doty has called The Story of Edgar Sawtelle "an American Hamlet." Certainly, there are moments that evoke that older drama, but many other significant story elements do not. Edgar's encounter with Ida Paine is one example out of many. Are other Shakespearean plays evoked in this story? Consider Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and The Tempest. In what sense is The Story of Edgar Sawtelle like all Elizabethan stage drama? Is it important to know (or not know) that the story is, at some level, a retelling of an older tale? Do you think Elizabethan audiences were aware that Hamlet was itself a retelling of an older story?
11. Until it surfaces later in the story, some readers forget entirely about the poison that makes its appearance in the Prologue; others never lose track of it. Which kind of reader were you? What is the nature of the poison? When the man and the old herbalist argue in the Prologue, who did you think was right?
12. In the final moments of the story, Essay must make a choice. What do you think she decides, and why? Do you think all the dogs will abide by her decision?

Gmail Themes - Beach

Still messing around with my gmail themes (especially looking at Planets, Pebbles, Beach, Mountain, and Graffiti)!

In the bottom right corner of Beach, an image of a turtle appears in the middle of the night, a crab before dawn, sea shells just before sunrise, and a snorkeling mask at sunrise, sunscreen before noon (or a sand bucket if it's cloudy), pink sunglasses around noon, an upside down ice cream cone in the early afternoon, and a beach ball in the late afternoon; and the colors change from purple to beige to rose to sea green to sky blue to sand in those hours.

In Bus stop, a giraffe seems to be around most of the time, but I just saw a kid with a giant ice cream cone with scoops falling onto a businessman!

And in Tree, the scene changes with the weather. Cloudy yesterday, so the scene was dark and stormy clouds. Sunny today, to the scene is bright and beautiful sunshine.

Totally adorable!

National Debt Clock Ran Out of Digits

Just read that the National Debt clock in near Times Square has run out digits in an email from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation (I signed up for this email list after seeing I.O.U.S.A.):

National Debt Clock Ran Out of Digits
Now Follow the National Debt on Twitter.

In October, the National Debt Clock in New York City ran out of digits because of the escalating fiscal burden on our government. The clock serves as a reminder to everyone who passes that the government owes more to the public (in the form of Treasury bills and savings bonds), and more to itself (in the form of money it borrows from one pot to spend on another) with each passing single day. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation has found a way for everyone to follow the debt using Twitter at http://twitter.com/nationaldebt.

What is Twitter? Twitter is one of the newest social networking services through which each user answers the question "What are you doing?" using 140 characters or less.

The answer to that question is known as a "tweet," and it's visible by those who "follow" you. By "following" others, you'll get their latest updates. It's free, easy to use, and by "following" the national debt on Twitter, you'll receive a daily "tweet" of the national debt as reported by the Treasury Department. Although this official number is the most commonly-cited national debt, it doesn't scratch the surface of the actual federal fiscal burden.

I suppose that $700 billion bailout put us over the top huh?

On the bright side, the email also shared the good news that I.O.U.S.A. is on the Academy Awards short-list for a best documentary feature nomination:

I.O.U.S.A. Makes Oscars Short List
For Best Documentary Feature

We're proud to announce that our critically acclaimed film I.O.U.S.A. has just received another honor - and with it, the film is now a step closer to earning one of the highest awards a documentary can receive.

I.O.U.S.A. is officially on the short list for an Oscar nomination in the Best Documentary Feature category. The film, directed by Sundance veteran Patrick Creadon (Wordplay), is among the 15 documentary features that will now advance in the voting process designating the final five nominees for next year's Academy Awards.

An Academy Award nomination would be more than just an honor for I.O.U.S.A. With the audience that the broadcast attracts - more than 30 million for last year's ceremony alone - an Oscar nomination would be another chance to show the entire nation just how alarming our current economic situation really is.

Watch I.O.U.S.A.: Byte-Sized - The 30 Minute Version of I.O.U.S.A.

I highly recommend this movie.

That reminds me, I ought to finally read my copy of Peter G. Peterson’s Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do about It.

Click here to view the table of contents, here to read an excerpt, or here to read a chapter by chapter summary.

Gmail Themes - Tea House

Planets, Pebbles, Beach, Mountain, and Graffiti have just showed up in my gmail themes (they weren't there at first)!

Still love Tea House, but Pebbles and Beach are pretty. I will try them out today.

In Tea House, ghosts (probably his ancestors) come out to play go before dawn and the sun moves with the time of day; the fox practices writing Chinese calligraphy in the middle of the night, plays the flute to ducks around dusk, has tea with a monkey friend in the late afternoon, lights his lanterns in the late evening, practices tai chi with his rabbit friends at sunrise, eats dinner in the evening, sweeps his house around lunch time, fills this bird bath in the late morning (after cutting some flowers from his garden), trims his bonsai tree in the early afternoon, and sleeps (while a turtle sits in his lawn) for a few hours each night.

Love it!

Gmail Themes!

This is sort of related to reading.

I have gmail open pretty much all the time; I get and send a lot of email. I also like to email myself articles that I read on-line and want to save.

I didn't have any problem with the plain simple look of gmail. In fact, I rather liked the minimalistic feel. But when my gmail look changed on me two days ago I was at first confused and annoyed.

But after poking around a bit I found gmail themes in my settings!


So pretty and cute. Definitely put a smile on my face.



I love how the scene in Tea House changes with the time.

Simple pleasures, I guess.

National Book Awards

National Book Awards were announced yesterday.

The winners are:

• Fiction: Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen (Click here to read an excerpt)
• Non-fiction: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed
• Poetry: Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems by Mark Doty
• Young People's Literature: What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell

I'd like to read some of these. But I feel like I'm having trouble getting through my current list of books to read.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

I have read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. I thought The Tipping Point started off great and lost momentum part way through the book. And I felt the same way about Blink.

Now I have just read about his latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success, in a New York Times review "It's True: Success Succeeds, and Advantages Can Help" by Michiko Kakutani.

And I am not impressed. Given Gladwell's cult-like following, I have no doubt that Outliers will be a bestseller.

I don't want to read it. But probably will just because everyone else will be raving about Gladwell's new book.

Wal-Mart & Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze

I read several more chapters of Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker last night (click here to view all my posts about this book). It is a good book. But it is so sad to read about how average working class Americans are treated, particularly those working at Wal-Mart.

The first half of chapter six, Leaner and Meaner, focuses on the yelling, screaming, cursing, bullying tactics used by managers at Wal-Mart and other companies to decrease costs and thus increase net profits. But the most interesting part of this chapter was learning how computers, which increase productivity by allowing routine tasks to get completed more quickly, decrease costs because of the ease in which they allow for monitoring of employees, cheating workers on payroll, and other shrewd tactics.

Chapter seven, Here Today, Gone Tomorrow, discusses corporations' increasing reliance on temporary workers, consultants / independent contractors, and permatemps (click here to read about Jean Capobianco's story as a FedEx driver, or here to read my previous post about that NYTimes article) while chapter eight, Wal-Mart, the Low-Wage Colossus, is all about the evil ways of the world's largest retailer and the world's largest company:

It is three times as large as the world's second-largest retailer, Carrefour of France. Its sales are greater than the combined sales of Target, Sears, JCPenny, Kohl's Safeway, Albertsons, and Kroger. ... It is the nation's largest grocer, and will have 35 percent of the nation's food market and 25 percent of the pharmacy market by the end of this decade, according to Retail Forward, a consulting firm. Wal-Mart already sells one-third of the nation's disposable dipers, toothpaste, shampoo, laundry detergent, paper towels, and nonprescription drugs, and some say it could soon caputre a 50 percent share for those products. It is the biggest customer of Walt Disney and Procter & Gamble and accounts for 28 percent of Dial's sales, 24 percent of Del Monte's, and 23 percent of Revlon's. Wal-Mart also accounts for 15 percent of the nation's single-copy magazine sales and nearly 20 percent of all sales of CDs, videos, and DVDs.

The tactics listed by Greenhouse include: end-of-shift lock-in, internal banishment, child labor, slashing schedules, overnight lock-ins, missed breaks, shaving time, hiring illegal immigrants, and sex discrimination (read David Cay Johnston's Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) to learn more about how Wal-Mart uses tax-financing and other tactics to increase profits).

Thankfully, it looks like the next chapter of this book, Taking the High Road, is about Costco and how it treats its workers better than Wal-Mart. More on this depressing and eye-opening book later...

Loving Frank Discussion

One of my book clubs just finished its discussion of Nancy Horan's Loving Frank, a historical novel fictionalizing the love affair of Mamah Borthwick Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright that my book club just loved.

Our first discussion question sparked much conversation as did our final discussion question:

How did Mamah's relationship with Ellen Key (the Swedish feminist whose work so profoundly influences Mamah) mirror - or differ- from hers with Frank Lloyd Wright?

Will write more about my thoughts on this book later.

The Big Squeeze by Steven Greenhouse

Just got through chapter five, The Rise and Fall of the Social Contract, from Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (click here to view all my posts about this book).

The background about the post-war business atmosphere in America and Walter Reuther's (president of General Motors division of the United Auto Workers) negotiations with Charles E. Wilson (president of General Motors) that helped to create the social contract that started to collapse for blue-collar workers in the 1980s and for white-collar workers in the 1990s provided an educational break from the heart-wrenching from the first few chapters.

Stories of Jefferson, Wiscosin's Chuck Moehling (a Tyson Foods pepperoni plant worker); of Birmingham, Alabama-native and former worker at North Miami Sam's Club Farris Cobb; of Bartlesville, Oklahoma-native Drew Pooters, a career retail worker and manager; and Dominican Republic immigrant Julia Ortiz fighting for wages at least equal to the federal minimum wage.

Expect to read more about this book...

The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker

I've read just a few chapters of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker by New York Times labor and workplace correspondent Steven Greenhouse (click here to view all my posts about this book).

So far, much of the data is the same as from David Cay Johnston's Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) and Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else.

And the chapters of this book, like Johnston's book, each read like separate articles/essays with a common theme. But what is different from Johnston's books is the human aspect -- Johnston tells the stories of hard-working men and women (and their families) and their struggle as employees of mostly big corporations to join the middle class.

In that sense, this book is a lot like what I would expect of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001), which I wrote a short paragraph about here.

Looking forward to reading more of The Big Squeeze, particularly once I get to where Greenhouse discusses examples of employers who treat their employees well.

Click here to view the table of contents or click here to to download a PDF excerpt.

White House Ghosts by Robert Schlesinger

I've finally finished Robert Schlesinger's White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters (click here to view all my posts about this book); once I made some time for reading it was a breeze to get through.

And my final verdict: this book is a winner!

As a young person born after most of these president's governed, I enjoyed learning more about our nation's presidents. I also liked learning about the roles of Chris Matthews, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Peggy Noonan, James Fallows, and other familiar figures through different administrations.

I especially appreciated reading about Eric Liu (who thoughtfully expressed the confusion anguish many Asian American's feel about their heritage and cultural identity in his memoir The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker, which I read in 2002) and Rahm Emmanuel and their roles in the Clinton administration.

Schlesinger convinced me of the importance of presidential speechwriters; as he tells it, Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush failed to win second terms (and Bill Clinton contributed to the Republicans winning control of the House and Senate and George W. Bush's election to governor of Texas in 1994) largely because they did not view presidential speeches as serious business.

And serious business it is. An effective leader must have excellent communication skills or will fail to effect change. So while some have derided Barack Obama for his eloquent prose, I believe it will make him a better president.

Click here to visit the official website for the White House Ghosts, here to read an excerpt on the publisher’s website, or here to view the table of contents.

Going to See the Elephant by Rodes Fishburne

Just got an email from Bantam Dell Publishing Group and Random House about Rodes Fishburne's debut novel, Going to See the Elephant, on sale December 30, 2008:

This captivating novel introduces one of the most engaging literary characters in recent years: Slater Brown, whose dream to be the greatest writer in the world leads him to discover the spirit of San Francisco—and himself.

The prologue and chapter one are available here and a new chapter will be posted here every week through December 8, 2008.

Clever idea to hook readers. My interest has been piqued.

Click here to visit the author's official website.

plate lunch

There are many foods I miss from my childhood in Honolulu but the plate lunch about sums it up: two scoops of white rice a side of mayonnaise-loaded macaroni salad (both served using an ice cream scooper to attain perfectly round scoops), with a deliciously greasy portion of meat (or fish or sometimes both).

If the plate lunch takes off on the mainland thanks to Barack Obama's victory, as discussed in this article from the New York Times, I would be overjoyed:

This carbo load — usually piled into a plastic foam container — is paired with a protein, generally of the pan-Asian variety, often slathered in brown gravy. After a morning of hard work (or hard surf), one might opt for Korean kalbi or meat jun, Chinese char siu roast pork, Philippine pork adobo, Hawaiian kalua pork (a luau favorite), Japanese katsu or salmon teriyaki, Portuguese sausage, American-style beef stew, or loco moco — a hamburger patty and a fried egg.

“The cultural significance of the plate lunch is that it illustrates Hawaii as a special place where all of our mixed cultures share their foods with one another,” said Matthew Gray, who runs Hawaii Food Tours, which ferries tourists to Oahu’s plate lunch outlets and other lesser known haunts. “Instead of referring to Hawaii as a melting pot, I prefer to call us a salad bowl, where we all get to share and showcase the individual flavors, aromas and histories of our food.”

The Hawaiian plate lunch traces its roots to the 1880s, when giant fruit and sugar companies controlled much of the local economy. Among other factors, the decimation of the local population by disease made the companies desperate for plantation workers, and they drew a labor pool from China, Japan, Portugal, the Philippines and other areas.

I can vouch for the legitimacy of this article; the must-eat places mentioned -- Rainbow Drive-In, Kaka'ako Kitchen, and Zippy's -- really are places locals eat.

Mmmm . . . I may have to make some chicken katsu or tonkatsu (Japanese fried chicken cutlet or pork cutlet) with or without Japanese brown curry or kalbi (Korean grilled beef short ribs) this weekend with a side of fried spam for a meal his weekend.

Thomas Friedman Presentation

Just got this email from ChangeThis.com regarding a presentation about Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America:

Greetings ChangeThisistas,

Thomas Friedman's publisher has sent us a video that, judging from your response to the free WORLD IS FLAT eBook offer we sent out in July, we thought you might be interested in.

The presentation is eight minutes long and taken from Part II of his new book HOT, FLAT, AND CROWDED: WHY WE NEED A GREEN REVOLUTION AND HOW IT CAN RENEW AMERICA. In it, he discusses Petropolitics, Global Weirding and why Al Gore owes us all a big apology.

If you're interested, head to the address below:
http://macmillan.hosted.panopto.com/CourseCast/Viewer/Default.aspx?id=3d7ef574-afec-4556-a44c-1022349e36ad

Enjoy!
ChangeThis
http://www.changethis.com/

It's worth eight minutes of your time :)

If by Rudyard Kipling

I wonder if Rudyard Kipling's classic poem "If" has been translated into Mandarin. I'd be interested in reading such a translation if it exists.

Here's the inspirational poem in it's original English.

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master,
If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings -- nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And -- which is more -- you'll be a Man, my son!

-Rudyard Kipling, 1895

Robert Schlesinger's White House Ghosts

Just an update on White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters by Robert Schlesinger (which I first heard about in May and have been slowly reading since August; click here to view all my posts about this book).

I am enjoying the book; Schlesinger is a great storyteller and with each chapter I am more and more impressed by his abilities.

It's just that with all of the excitement surrounding the Presidential election and the drama of the financial crisis, I found myself watching news on tv and reading news online during every spare moment.

So I confess I haven't been reading as much as I'd like to these past few months.

Click here to visit the official website for the book, here to read an excerpt of White House Ghosts on the publisher’s website, or here to view the table of contents.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

One of my book clubs has just selected yet another Oprah's Book Club book as it's next selection: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel by David Wroblewski.

Some of the girls in my book club said that Oprah told her viewers not to read the inside cover of the book until they have read the book, and the girls in my book club who have already read the book suggested not reading anything about the book until you've read the book in its entirety.

So all I know about this book is what I read in Janet Maslin's review for the New York Times "Talking to Dogs, Without a Word" published june 13, 2008.

That's all I'll say since I'd hate to spoil the book for anyone.

Click here to visit the author's website where you can read an excerpt, find discussion questions, and much more.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

I don't know much about the High Plains Dust Bowl of the 1930s, so I'm interested in reading Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, a National Book Award winner in 2006 (also in 2006 it won the Washington State Book Award and the Oklahoma Book Award) - click here to read Elizabeth Royte's December 2005 review titled "The Anti-Joads."

Timothy Egan is a reporter for the New York Times and I seem to gravitate towards books written by the Times staff.

The Table of Contents looks promising...

Introduction: Live Through This 1

I • PROMISE: The Great Plowup, 1901–1930
1. The Wanderer 13
2. No Man’s Land 32
3. Creating Dalhart 52
4. High Plains Deutsch 59
5. Last of the Great Plowup 73

II • BETRAYAL, 1931–1933
6. First Wave 91
7. A Darkening 103
8. In a Dry Land 115
9. New Leader, New Deal 128
10. Big Blows 136

III • BLOWUP, 1934–1939
11. Triage 145
12. The Long Darkness 155
13. The Struggle for Air 171
14. Showdown in Dalhart 176
15. Duster’s Eve 193
16. Black Sunday 198
17. A Call to Arms 222
18. Goings 236
19. Witnesses 242
20. The Saddest Land 254
21. Verdict 265
22. Cornhusker II 273
23. The Last Men 279
24. Cornhusker III 293
25. Rain 303

Epilogue 309
Notes and Sources 315
Acknowledgments 328
Index 331

Click here to read an excerpt of the first chapter.

Loving Frank discussion

One of my book clubs has just started its discussion of Nancy Horan's Loving Frank, a historical novel fictionalizing the love affair of Mamah Borthwick Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright that my book club just loved.

Our first discussion question sparked much conversation as did our final discussion question:

How did Mamah's relationship with Ellen Key (the Swedish feminist whose work so profoundly influences Mamah) mirror - or differ- from hers with Frank Lloyd Wright?

Will write some of my general thoughts on this book later.

Barack Obama '79

Punahou has this statement on it's website regarding Obama's historic victory:

Barack Obama ’79 Elected President of the United States

Punahou alumnus Barack Obama was elected the 44^th president of the United States in an historic election. As a first-term senator from Illinois, Obama's candidacy has brought significant attention to Hawai‘i and to Punahou School.

In his acceptance speech, Senator Obama said, "It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America."

Punahou School President James K. Scott today said, "This is a historic moment for America and the world, and for Hawai‘i. We are thrilled and honored that a Punahou School alumnus - and son of Hawai‘i - has been elected to serve as the next President of the United States. At Punahou School, our calling is to foster each student's potential to reach his or her promise and effect meaningful change in society. President-elect Obama is an inspirational embodiment of that vision."

Barack Obama was born in Hawai‘i and attended Punahou School beginning in the 5^th grade, graduating in 1979.

Yippeee!

Michael Crichton

Wow, shockingly Michael Crichton died of cancer yesterday at the age of 66.

When I was in my teens, Crichton was one of my favorite authors and over the years I have frequently enjoyed re-reading his works.

Of his many books, the medical thriller A Case of Need was the one I liked the most -- even more than Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Disclosure, The Great Train Robbery (my second favorite Crichton book), The Andromeda Strain, or any of his other best sellers.

What I always found so interesting about A Case of Need was that Crichton originally published it under a pseudonym (Jeffrey Hudson) when he was still a 26-year-old Harvard medical student (in 1968). After it won an Edgar Allen Poe Award in 1969, it gave Crichton the confidence he needed to leave medicine and his prestigious fellowship at Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, CA.

I think what I loved about Crichton's books was that they filled you with a sense of wonder about science -- and as a math and science geek I appreciated that.

Now I'd like more than ever to read Crichton's State of Fear (by the way, I recently learned that Crichton was a Visiting Writer at MIT in 1988).

The Mind of the Market by Michael Shermer

Here are my notes on the rest of Michael Shermer's The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (click here to read my notes through chapter five, here to read my notes on chapter six and seven, and here to read my initial thoughts on this book).

In chapter eight, Why Money Can't Buy You Happiness, Shermer introduces Jeremy Bentham's "seven circumstances" by which "the value of a pleasure or a pain in considered (part of Bentham's "hedonistic calculus" to measure happiness):

• purity: "the chance it has of not being followed by sensations of the opposite kind"
• intensity: "the strength, force, or power of the pleasure"
• propinquity: "the proximity in time or place of the pleasure"
• certainty: "the sureness of the pleasure"
• fecundity: "the chance it has of being followed by sensations of the same kind"
• extent: "the number of persons to whom it extends"
• duration: "the length of time the pleasure will last"

Shermer then describes all the ways in which the standard of living has dramatically risen over the past fifty years -- median income is up, crime is up, leisure is up, pollution is down, and more -- and contrasts that with the statistic that "by all measures of the Subjective Well-Being (SWB), people are no happier today than they were half a century ago" (this I know I learned from The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwarz and other books related to positive psychology) which he calls the "Happiness Disconnect."

Chapter eight continues quoting many ideas from positive psychology; since I've written much about this topic I'll refrain from writing about it here. Instead I'll list some of the books quoted in this chapter:

• The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States by Edward O. Laumann
• The Happiness Myth by Jennifer Hecht
• The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self by Peggy La Cerra and Roger Bingham
• The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits by Gordon Burghardt

Chapter nine, Trust with Credit Verification, seems highly relevant to the current credit crisis. Shermer has a spot-on quote from Paul Zak: "when trust is low, investment lags. The same positive correlation holds for GDP growth and trust." Shermer goes on to say that "countries that have higher rates of generalized trust show higher rates of return on national stock markets" and "that in order for a nation to achieve prosperity it is vital to maximize positive social interactions among its members in order to increase trust." Surprisingly, Zak found that people in polluted environments tend to have less trust (related to levels of oxytocin) and found many other conclusions related to trust:

• trust and happiness: "people who trust and are trustworthy report being hapier"
• trust and touch: touch increases trust
• trust and smell: trust may be mediated by smell (read The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell by Rachel Herz for more on smell)
• trust and neglect: "animals that are abused or neglected shortly after birth show a loss of regions in the brain that have oxytocin receptors, and those animals become withdrawn, socially inappropriate, and depressed."

Shermer continues to discuss Zak's findings throughout this chapter, including Zak's postulate that "evil" people (people who do not respond to oxytocin and who basically cannot be trusted) "are necessary from an evolutionary standpoint because they keep physiologic balance between appropriate levels of trust and distrust optimally tuned. Without these exceedingly selfish people, humans might have evolved into being unconditional trusters. If so, we would become susceptible to invasion by those who would prey on our perfectly trusting nature."

Chapter ten, The Science of Good Rules, starts out with Shermer's story of founding the three-thousand-mile nonstop transcontinental bicycle Race Across America (RAAM) from Los Angeles to New York and the subsequent creation of the Ultra-Marathon Cycling Association (UMCA) to deal with the development and adjudication of the rules as the rules increased in complexity with the number of participants. This chapter is all about the need for a society based on the rule of law and formal institutions, due to our evolved potential sources of conflict: "our selfish desire for self improvement conflicts with or altruistic desire for social enhancement, and our competitive desire to better our lot in life sometimes comes in conflict with the same desire that others have in themselves."

Chapter eleven is named after Google's corporate motto, Don't Be Evil. Shermer states:

For markets to be moral, there must be two conditions: (1) internal trust reinforced by personal relationships, and (2) external rules reinforced by social institutions.

This chapter what happens when those institutions fail, our desire to conform to the social norms of our group, WorldCom and Enron type corporate failures, Phil Zimbado's classic Stanford Prison Experiment, Stanley Milgram's well-known experiments on obedience to authority (increasing "shocks" to help someone "learn"), and (of course) Google. I have lots of friends who work at Google so the passage about the free meals and such at Googleplex weren't new to me, but they might be surprising to non-nerds.

Chapter twelve, Free to Choose, discusses the importance of freedom and the problems with paternalism while the epilogue, To Open the World, returns to the Yanomamo hunter-gatherers and the Manhattan consumer-traders that the book began with. Shemer's oversimplified conclusion?

Power kills; democracy saves. Spread democracy.

Trade leads to peace and prosperity. Spread trade.

Where Starbucks crosses frontiers, armies will not.

Where information and knowledge cross frontiers, armies will not.

Freedom finds a way.

I don't want to sound harsh, but I would not recommend this book. Maybe it's just me and my constant reading, but I found much of the book unoriginal. And I felt mislead about the book's premise, and that gives me a generally bad feeling.

Still, I enjoyed the education on free market theory!

Obama!

Yay for Obama!

As an alumnus of Punahou School and as an American, I am ecstatic and proud about Obama's victory tonight!

If you haven't read either of his books -- Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance and The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream -- I highly recommend them.

I've listened to the audio version of Dreams from My Father and it is fantastic! Every bit as wonderful as you'd except from a Grammy winner -- Obama's ability to do voices (including those of his Kenyan relatives) is unbelievable.

I haven't finished The Audacity of Hope yet but will try to do so before Obama's inauguration on January 20, 2009!

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything

During a recent conversation with friends recently, the topic of building a business to create change in third world countries came up -- I guess the United States presidential election has led to some intense conversations about the state of the world.

Naturally, I thought of a fantastic book I read earlier this year: Influencer: The Power to Change Anything by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan & Al Switzler (click here to view the table of contents). Influencer was written by the authors of the best-selling books Crucial Confrontations: Tools for Resolving Broken Promises, Violated Expectations, and Bad Behavior and Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High.

I highly recommend these three books. Communication is important in all aspects of life -- personal and business relationships -- and these books provide readers the tools to become better communicators.

I'm certainly not an expert -- I still fly off the handle when people needle me, and I could still improve on my tactics for getting my points across, but I'd like to think I'm much improved.

Sadly, I read these books before I started this blog so I don't have comprehensive notes on them. Though this excerpt from the book sums up Influencer quite well:

Influencer takes you on a fascinating journey from San Francisco to Thailand where you'll see how seemingly “insignificant” people are making incredibly significant improvements in solving problems others would think impossible. You'll learn how savvy folks make changenot only achievable and sustainable, but inevitable. You'll discover why some managers have increased productivity repeatedly and significantly-while others have failed miserably.

...

In Influencer you’ll meet change geniuses who have used the principles of Influence to solve some of the world’s most profound and catastrophic problems. You’ll meet:

• One woman who has turned 14,000 thieves, prostitutes, and murderers into upstanding citizens without therapists, a professional staff, donations, grants, or guards.
• A health advocate who has nearly eradicated a debilitating disease without traditional medicines or vaccines.
• A healthcare professional who has helped save more than 120,000 lives in America’s hospitals without a medical degree.

And many others who have lost weight, saved a struggling community, improved damaged relationships, secured bottom-line results, revamped corporate culture, etc…

The stories from Influencer are heartwarming and educational. The authors teach their theory of vital behaviors (high-leverage action that will directly lead to the results you desire that are behaviors and not results and are recognizable and repeatable) and six sources of influence to effect change:

• Personal Motivation
• Personal Ability
• Social Motivation
• Social Ability
• Structural Motivation
• Structural Ability

You know, I liked this book so much that I may add it to my list of books to purchase.

Click here to visit the authors' comprehensive website for this book, where you can download a pdf excerpt of the first chapter, download a pdf of the Influencer Self-Assessment, download a pdf of the Influencer Worksheet, download a pdf of the Influencer Discussion Questions, and much more!

Books on Publishing

I'm interested in learning about the book publishing industry. I've been told to read:

• Dan Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual, 16th Edition: How to Write, Print and Sell Your Own Book by Dan Poynter


• Publishing for Profit: Successful Bottom-Line Management for Book Publishers by Thomas Woll


• How To Start And Run A Small Book Publishing Company: A Small Business Guide To Self-Publishing And Independent Publishing by Peter I. Hupalo

I tried my local library but they don't seem to have many books on this topic.

Any other suggestions?

Michael Shermer's The Mind of the Market: chapter six & seven

Here are my notes on chapter six of Michael Shermer's The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (click here to read my notes through chapter five and click here to read my initial thoughts on this book).

Chapter six, The Extinction of Homo Economicus, focuses on behaviorism and behavioral economics. Much of this chapter felt familiar from my college introductory psychology course and here are some of the terms:

• matching law: "organisms will match their rate of responding to the rate of reinforcement" (discovered by Harvard psychology Richard Herrnstein and author of Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life)
• habituation: a decrease in response to a stimulus after repeated stimulation
• undermatching effect: "the more variables added to a choice, the more complicated the decision and the less predictable the behavior"
• law of supply and demand: an example of an autocatalytic feedback loop that "predicts that if the price of a good is at a low enough level to cause consumers to demand more of it than producers are prepared to supply, the price will go up until demand decreases"; the converse it true and "market equilibrium is reached at the point where the quantity supplied is approximately equal to the quantity demanded, and the balance is maintained through this interaction of consumers, producers, and prices"
• time preference: "how we discount value over time"
• intertemporal choice: "decisions that include tradeoffs among costs and benefits occurring at different times" (people prefer long-term options if given an incentive; most people would rather take $20 today versus $22 in one week, but most people would rather take $22 in eight weeks over $20 in seven weeks)
• experienced utility: moment by moment experience
• retrospective utility: the recollection of the aggregate experiences
• peak-end rule: "we judge a past event almost entirely on how the experience was at its peak and at its end . . . instead of a net average for the entire duration of the event"
• coefficient of determination: r squared (where r is the correlation coefficient), a statistic that determines how well a model fits

Shermer concludes chapter six with the finding that how risk-averse or risk-seeking we are depends on our brains and starts chapter seven, The Value of Virtue, with a classic moral dilemma to illustrate that "evolution has designed us to value humans over nonhumans":

You are walking along a railroad line when you come upon a fork in the track and a switch. There are five workers on one track and one worker on the other track. Suddenly, you realize that a trolley car is hurtling along and is about to hit and kill the five workers unless you throw the switch and divert the car down the other branch, killing the one worker instead. Kill one to save five. Would you throw the switch? Most people say that they would. In a second scenario, instead of coming upon a switch, you happen across a bridge where there is a large man standing next to you. The trolley is once again speeding down the track and is about to hit and kill the five workers, nless you push the large man onto the track, killing him but stopping the car. Kill one to save five. Would you throw the man? Most people say that they would not.

Shermer then teaches readers about what we find attractive in mates -- people whose bodies and faces are bilaterally symmetrical, men with an inverted-pyramid-shaped upper body (and a strong jaw), women with a waist-to-hip rtio of 0.7:1 (and full lips, strong cheek bones, thick and silky hair, ) -- from David Buss's The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (which I read in 2002) and provides extensive lists of human universals as determined by anthropologist Donald Brown:

Universal moral emotions

• affection expressed and felt: necessary for altruism and cooperation
• attachment: necessary for bonding, friendship, mutual aid
• coyness display: courtship, moral manipulation
• crying: expression of grief, moral pain
• empathy: necessary for moral sense
• envy: moral trait
• fears: basis of guilt
• generosity admired: reward for cooperative and altruistic behavior
• incest taboo: moral prohibition with genetic implications
• judging others: foundation of moral approval/disapproval
• mourning: expression of grief
• pride: a moral sense
• self-control: moral behavior
• sexual jealousy: foundation of moral mate guarding
• shame: moral sense

Universal moral behaviors

• age statuses: social hierarchy, dominance, respect for elder wisdom
• coalitions: foundation of social and group morality
• collective identities: basis of xenophobia, group selection
• conflict mediation: foundation of much of moral behavior
• customary greetings: part of conflict prevention and resolution
• dominance/submission: foundation of social hierarchy
• etiquette: enhances social relations
• family (or household): the most basic social and moral unit
• food sharing: form of cooperation and altruism
• gift giving: reward for cooperative and altruistic behavior
• government: social morality
• group living: social morality
• groups that are not based on family: necessary for higher moral reasoning and indirect reciprocity
• inheritance rules: reduces conflict within families and communities
• institutions: rule enforcement
• kin groups: foundation of kin selection/altruism and basic social group
• law (rights and obligations): foundation of social harmony
• marriage: moral rules of foundational relationship
• reciprocal exchanges: reciprocal altruism
• redress of wrongs: moral conflict resolution
• sanctions: social moral control
• sanctions that include removal from the social unit: social moral control

Universal economic emotions and behaviors (based on the fundamental principle of reciprocity universally expressed as the golden "do onto others as you would have them do unto you")

• cooperative labor: part of kin, reciprocal, and indirect altruism
• fairness: equity
• food sharing: form of cooperation and altruism
• generosity admired: reward for cooperative and altruistic behavior
• gestures: signs of recognition of others, conciliatory behavior
• gift giving: reward for cooperative and altruistic behavior (also in above list)
• hospitality: enhances social relations
• insulting: communication of moral disapproval
• judging others: foundation of moral approval/disapproval
• planning for future: foundation of moral judgment
• pride: a moral sense
• promise: moral relations
• negative reciprocity: revenge, retaliation, reduces reciprocal altruism
• positive reciprocity: enhances reciprocal altruism
• redress of wrongs: moral conflict resolution
• shame: moral sense
• turn-taking: conflict prevention

Whew that was exhausting! Shermer then goes on to discuss evolution -- particularly evolutionary choices of monogamy, adultery, and jealousy -- in economic terms.

Additional terms learned include:

• kin altruism: evolved to aid and reinforce cooperation to facilitate genetic propagation through children
• reciprocal altruism (inclusive fitness): "I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine"
• blind altruism: "if you scratch my back now, I'll scratch yours later"
• Evolutionary Stable Strategies (ESS): Nash equilibrium which is "evolutionarily" stable meaning that once it is fixed in a population, natural selection alone is sufficient to prevent alternative strategies from successfully gaining traction
• Costly Signaling Theory (CST): "people sometimes do things not just to help those related to them genetically, and not just to help those who will return the favor, either now or later, but to send a signal, or a message that says, in essence, 'My altruistic and charitable acts prove that I am an honest and trustworthy member of the community, and that I am so successful that I can afford to make such sacrifices for other and for the group.'"

Okay that's all I can stand to write today. To learn more, click here to visit Shermer's website.