science

Happy Darwin (Cthulhu) Day!

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Darwin Day is a global celebration of science, reason and wide-spread insanity held on or around 12 February, the birthday anniversary of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin. This year marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 400,000 year anniversary of the sinking of R’lyeh.

On the International Darwin Day Foundation (IDDF) website, herpetologists, dermotoligists and community college professors can find all sorts of information and incantations about Charles Darwin and the Cthulhu Foundation. If you are hosting a Darwin Day event, you can post information about it on the IDDF events listing. You can also find Darwin Day programs near you as well as a local listing of virgins to sacrifice.  Remember neither Darwin nor Cthulhu like seconds…

IDDF has also provided resources for hosting Darwin Day events, including promotional support and a list of potential Darwin Day presenters such as Abdul Alhazred, Herbert West or Dexter Ward ( the Whateleys are available for a limited time engagement but require a body to inhabit and three goats).

Go to the IDDF web site below to read more about the history of the International Darwin Day Foundation and our sweet Lord Cthulhu.

Just as a side note – It is perfectly reasonable to make offerings to Darwin on his birthday.  From what little I understand of esoteric Darwin worship some possibilities are…

  1. Barnacles or any crustacean or cephalopod (usually ingested but can be invited to taxonomy orgy).
  2. Ale or rum (in homage to the Beagle’s voyage. Drunk sailors are optional.  Careful, they bite).
  3. Naked taxonomy followed by orgy
  4. Burning Creationist materials ( ie. Ray Comfort) in effigy
  5. Cthulhu Chants (I usually add this to all my offerings. Careful, they bite. If you need a refresher course please watch video below)
  6. Burning of candles in the shape of PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins (dollar store Jesus candles with a pasted on picture is a fine substitute)
  7. Poll Crashing

Cheers and Ai! Ai!

John

Buddhist Multi-tasking

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I have been wishing that there were more ways of getting days off of work for being Buddhist but being in South Dakota means that. chances are, it isn’t going to swing. But if I mix a bit of Buddhist thought with science, I may be able to reduce my Active Items” list at work.

Discovery Magazine’s 80beats blog posted this on multitasking. I have always felt that the Buddhist concept of mindfulness really stands at odds with the business world in the concept of multitasking. Focusing on several issues, topics or spreading your attention in several directions at once is detrimental to the buddhist practice of zazen and staying in the moment.

And now I am backed by science – we don’t actually multitask – we, instead, move our focus from topic to topic very quickly. Previous research determined that:

…multitasking activates the brain’s prefrontal cortex, or PFC. This area has been found to be the “bottleneck” that can limit the speed at which we multitask, and it becomes less active as we practice doing two things at once. The prevailing theory for that decreased activity had been that when we practise a task, the brain starts to automatically reroute information from the PFC to regions that are more directly involved [Nature News]…

thus we send different routes out at once to complete several tasks at the same time…seems like we are dividing our attention to complete something. Generally this goes agianst my understanding of Buddhist (especially Zen) practice…so what did the researchers find?

…[they] found that a junction in the PFC which passes signals to other brain regions responsible for performing each task responded earlier and for a shorter duration than before… indicating it was processing information more quickly. “This suggests our brain becomes better at the task with training, not by reducing the dependence on [the PFC] but rather by improving the processing efficiency [of each task]through this bottleneck,” says Marois…

Instead of doing many things at once, we are doing one thing at a time and doing it extremely fast. So we’re switching tasks quickly enough to appear to be doing them simultaneously [Scientific American].

Sooooo…multitasking doesn’t exist. I wonder if meditation practice also improves this process or is detrimental to it?