For my friends Birgitt and Ward who suffered through a bad ice storm in North Carolina last week: Birches by Robert Frost When I see birches bend to left and right Across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay. Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning After a rain. They click upon themselves As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed …
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AKMA’s Random Thoughts: Illich and Us, and Miscellanea As a homeschooling parent, I marked Ivan Illich’s death earlier this week with sadness. So did AKMA who went on to discuss these great homeschooling strategies Then too, we haven�t deployed elaborate stratified appointed-hours lesson plans to impose order on our young ones. We simply made space in which they might learn (a shade easier in our context, as we don�t watch television at home). They read, and read, and take classes that interest them outside our home, and read, and do interesting stuff. (One of our favorite tactics has been leaving …
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The Tesseract – a 4-dimensional cube Hypercube is a multidimensional analogue of a 3-dimensional cube in that each coordinate of a point in a hypercube is restricted to the same 1-dimensional (line) segment. Tesseract is a 4-dimensional hypercube. In anticipation of MAM 2000, a remark by A. K. Dewdney served an additional reason to write about the tesseract. Wrote he, “Dimensions seem to creep up in everywhere as HYPERCUBE is written.” Dewdney was referring to matrices (2-dimensional objects) and vectors (1-dimensional objects) that are part of any modern computer language. They are also handy in describing and manipulating multidimensional objects. …
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Overview of Loving-kindness Meditation Loving-kindness is a meditation practice, which brings about positive attitudinal changes as it systematically develops the quality of ‘loving-acceptance’. It acts, as it were, as a form of self-psychotherapy, a way of healing the troubled mind to free it from its pain and confusion. Of all Buddhist meditations, loving-kindness has the immediate benefit of sweetening and changing old habituated negative patterns of mind.
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Genevi�ve Bergeron H�l�ne Colgan Nathalie Croteau Barbara Daigneault Anne-Marie Edward Maud Haviernick Maryse Lagani�re Maryse Leclair Anne-Marie Lemay Sonia Pelletier Mich�le Richard Annie St-Arneault Annie Turcotte Barbara Klucznik Widajewicz You must know who these women are. You may know the name of the man that killed them 13 years ago. But on this day of remeberance, as the federal government is up to it’s eye balls in mush over how badly it has mismanaged the gun control process, we should remember these women.