The promise is simple enough. A data driven approach to the benefits of meditation. The execution is a lot more complicated than the promise and will cost you hundreds of dollars in equipment. Equipment you will use a few minutes a day to calculate a nebulous score. The introduction to Lea Lagos’s Heart Breath Mind Train your Heart to Conquer Stress and Achieve Success makes a big promise: The breathing exercises and peak performanc…

I spend more time walking circles in the Standing Palms postures than in other martial art practice. I strive for that magical sixty-four circles in both directions for each of the ten palms that make up my daily practice. I rarely get there in a single session. On one especially muggy day I sat sweating and panting on the floor with my arms tingling from the fixed postures and read this article: Why some scientists say physics has gon…

Have you done it? Are you so addicted to your smartphone that you downloaded an application to help you meditate? I have, and I didn’t know there was real money in this nonsense until I did. Turns out, Silicon Valley tech investors have found a way to monetize you sitting on your ass and breathing, and Calm is the Mecca of cash. Monetizing mindfulness is not new. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Deepak Chopra, and Wayne Dyer have made millions out of t…

“White trash wet dream,” I said to a friend after I started the first season of The Walking Dead. He didn’t get it. Most don’t because themes of post-apocalyptic science fiction are deeper than you assume. Science fiction, though strictly made up, has true things to say about the world. The situation of The Walking Dead is fictional, but it had plenty to say about 2020 America. A white trash wet dream is a post-apocalyptic world…

With the impeachment of Donald J. Trump behind us, it is time for reflection on the events of the last month. On any day, I collect more links than I can read in a week. Most of us are like this. Bombarded with information, it’s hard to choose the quality from the click-bait. If I wait a few days, the stuff I thought important in the moment, was just chaff in the wind. That is why I let my reading list mellow. When I return to it, …

This story, especially in 2020, is important. First, just as an adventure story, like in my science fiction, someone is going to pay the price for the adventure. There is usually a character who will sacrifice their life for the better good. Sometimes, a character will charge into battle to give everyone else a chance to escape. But in this story, that didn’t happen. With the crew of the Endurance, no one gave their life. No one…

Leo Tolstoy wrote the definitive judgment on Christianity in his book The Kingdom of God is Within You. You should read it. If you can remain conscious, and mindfully absorb the arguments Tolstoy makes about non-violence, it will forever change your view of humanity. Mahatma Gandhi read it and freed India from the British empire. Martin Luther King, Jr. used it as a mirror to show how hateful and violent white Christian America rea…

Sometimes the tool comes to you. WordPress is a robust platform, but it has a few quirks that get under the skin of experienced coders. Everything is a post is a fine model, but after seventeen years you should be able to display those posts in dynamic ways. Sure, there are plugins, but WordPress is the platform, and a platform that doesn’t you give the tools for the most basic element of its existence is weak. With a little PHP cod…

Galaxy crossing science fiction space operas are pure fantasy. Sure, we call them science fiction because they have spaceships and plasma rifles, but there is little science in even the most hard sci-fi stories. The term “hard science fiction” is rather new. When Arthur C. Clarke was writing his novels and fashioning one of the most influential movies of all time, science fiction was still just science fiction. In fact, Sir Arthur’s de…

After finishing my first episode of TWiV, I realized that I needed a refresher course on viruses. I want to know the basics, without taking biology again. YouTube is both a cesspool, a library, and my first stop when researching a subject. I have learned to look for older videos YouTube Creators have not repurposed into sponsor driven streams filled with fluff, filler, and sponsors. This video is direct, easy to understand and has h…

I try not to think about theme when I am writing. Falling in that pit is the quickest way to lose a story. In a literature class you were told that theme is what the author is trying to convey, a central idea or meaning to the story. In rare exceptions, that might be true. In truth, authors have no idea what themes will manifest when they start a work. A few will pretend they had a grand design to start, but I never believed it. I v…

This Week in Virology. The podcast about viruses. The kind that make you sick. A refrain I hear more than once a week since I started listening to this excellent podcast all about the coronavirus. No. That’s not right. This podcast is all about viruses; the kind that make you sick. In late March, I realized my regular sources were not enough to keep me informed about the growing pandemic. At that time, the World Health Organization …

As children all we have dreams. As infants we lack income, property, and choice and we are fragile and slow to grow compared to the rest of the natural world. As soon as we achieve enough independence to think and wander on our own, society dictates we get an education, attend church or temple, or at least recognize a higher power. Unable to chart our own course, dreams are all that remain. When I was a child, daydreaming was a sin….

What life is valuable? More precisely, whose life is valuable? Is your life more valuable than mine? Does your position, title, salary, or family relationship make your contribution to this small planet more valuable than mine? This is not a small question. We ask it in fiction yet ignore it in reality. On this globe, everyday decisions have determined that some lives are more valuable than others. Last month the powerful cyclone…

I do not celebrate birthdays. Despite the convention, you have only one. All days after that are living days. The particular orbit of our planet around the sun has nothing to do with age. Age is biological. If our planet orbited at the distance of Uranus, most of us would never celebrate a birthday. Worse than the birthday celebration for the living is the need to celebrate a birthday for someone dead. As an orbital celebration shouldn…

Have you been locked in despair for weeks while ignoring events around you? Have you looked up to find that it is a fresh spring day, the birds are chirping, and the air is crisp against your skin, then wonder how you missed it? That is what reading The One Tree is like. It is a deep dive into the character of Linden Avery, a character who never sees the spring day, or understands the events around her because the bitterness of her pas…

Those “real-people” reviews on Amazon and Goodreads have difficulty finding themes in The Gap Cycle; imagining a more clueless lot is difficult for me. At the end of The Real Story Stephen R. Donaldson summarized his intent, his themes and—in broad strokes—outlined the story he prepared. The Gap Cycle is not an attempt to mimic the Wagnerian epic of Der Ring des Nibelungen, but it is about the moral conflict between humanity’s desire t…

2001: A Space Odyssey was boring. There I said it. I know you were thinking it. After the chimpanzees smash bones to Thus Spoke Zarathustra there are about a hundred minutes of nothing until we get to, “Open the pod bay doors,” followed by a light show that requires the high of psychedelics to be appreciated. That 2001 was boring did not stop it from becoming the most influential film made in my lifetime. The accurate (19…

What is Evil? Does it exist? When you speak about the world, do you define an act, a person, or a group as evil? I have called Donald Trump Lord Foul since the 2016 Republican National Convention, by association, am I calling him evil? If evil does not exist, then what is that quality we identify as evil? Is evil a treatable sickness, disease, or mental condition? The question of evil is a foundation for good fiction. Science fiction a…

How much can humanity consume? Earth is a solitary realm. She has a long past, most of it devoid of humanity. Thanks to plate tectonics and the unique chemical ability of sediment and stone to record images of Earth’s past, we know that other creatures once roamed the plains and forests or swam the deep oceans of our world. The Kansas prairie is full of fossils from the Permian geologic period. The diversification of amniotes into mamm…

A few dramatic scenes are etched onto the consciousness of the collected public. From cinema there is Indiana Jones running from a boulder only to land at the feet of his rival, or Lawrence crossing a desert on a camel. From television there is the intro to MASH, or Kramer entering Seinfeld’s apartment. “Neuman!” From literature there is the white whale sinking the Pequod, or Gandalf standing on the Bridge of Khazad-dum declaring that …