Big Biphle is a Big Boggle clone I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It is customized for the Apple iPhone but it should play fine in your web browser.
The objective of Big Biphle is to list, within 3 minutes, as many 4 or more letter words of the highest point value as you can find among the random assortment of letters in the grid.
Have fun!
"If the facts prove Buddhist tenets are wrong, the tenets will have to be changed."
—The Dalai Lama
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by Sean J. Vaughan
I have gotten swept up in the new Atheism wave. And yet I remain Zen Buddhist. Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" has outspokenly helped put Athesism back into the global consciousness where it needs to be. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Dan Barker and others are respectfully and reasonably showing the merits and logic of embracing atheism. And I love it! I'm enthused!
However, I have had a deep challenge figuring out whether I can remain Zen Buddhist and at the same time embrace my Atheist roots and understanding. Something as serious as religion best not be taken on faith.
I'm tired of trying to justify the great zen master saying that the cat burgler made the tofu rise to the top of the pot with its mind bullets. (The story: tofu was being stolen, the zen master meditated all night next to the tofu pot, a cat watched the pot until tofu rose to the top, the cat ate the tofu). Sure, the cat indirectly showed the zen master the enlightening fact that the water/tofu temperature inversion can cause tofu to rise in water. But if you don't grasp this temperature inversion, you're not listening to the cat, Mister Master.
And, I'm sorry but there is not a hungry ghost in the plumbing. I don't mind cleaning every speck of food out of my bowl, believe my 250 pounds. But don't tell me any remaining specks going down the rinse are going to choke a hungry ghost.
And as for the zen master enlightening a general by making a river run backwards: THAT'S quite a Mystery Spot. Don't make me go crazy trying to justify craziness.
Many might find me a bit childish for taking the stories so literally. Can I no longer even enjoy secular art, movies, books and such? Well, I usually enjoy those things. I guess giving up all fiction in pursuit of truth might be more difficult than going along with, gasp, faith. Maybe I just need to lighten up. The Middle Path and all. Honestly, though, nobody had a smirk on their face when they told me about the hungry ghosts. What I need, then, is some clear indicator for the important stories. From what I can tell, they're all basically jumbled together.
Good, there is an indicator. When it comes to stories and beliefs, science comes first and the rest come second, or not at all. Our words are not the realities they point to. At the same time, humans have a very basic sense for learning about reality through storytelling and metaphor. This sense is quite possibly more intuitive and refined than our sense of reason at this point in our evolution. Through storytelling, religion can provide an artistic and intuitive way of understanding complex reality just like learning about ourselves by watching a good movie. And, these stories can help us until we need to understand the more complex scientific foundations behind the stories or, more directly, reality itself.
Just don't lead me to believe the foundations are an old white-bearded man out there everywhere pulling the string theories. Or that there's a big bad boogie man (not a God, mind you!) that wants me to do his brand of evil so he can torment my soul for the rest of eternity. Or that cat huffing is imbibing the flying spaghetti monster's body. Or that legendary zen masters could make rivers flow backwards before our eyes. Puh-leez.
I discussed my personal zen athiest dilemma with the abbot of my zen center and he didn't banish me. Phew, what a relief. He noted that zen comes before God, before Atheism, before Buddhism, before words. HUT! Just this. Clean perception mirror. Oh, yeah!
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by Sean J. Vaughan
This article describes how readers can find and be guided to Reason and Rhyme articles. Our main traffic source is Google and so our first job is to ensure Google finds and ranks our articles as highly as possible.
Google PageRank is how google assigns "importance" to web pages. Most of our web pages are either unranked or have a low PageRank. A very small percentage (<5%) of our pages have a medium PageRank. A page's PageRank increases by having other pages link to it and the increase is larger when the linking site has a larger PageRank.
Still, when you search for "Reason and Rhyme" you will should find our links on the first results page. Many of our articles will show up towards the beginning of the search results when you search for "epic poetry", "statistics of stereotyping", "the sonnet", or other queries related to our articles. Certainly most of our authors show up near the beginning of the search results when searched for.
For more information about google pagerank, read google's description. And, you can read a gajillion blog articles about it. Seriously, at least a gajillion.
Writing articles for traffic (aka Search Engine Optimized or SEO) isn't our primary motivition for writing. In fact, SEO approaches may hurt the quality of articles (e.g. poems). In general, though, the SEO approaches tend to make an article better; they are very similar to what I learned in journalism class.
Here are a few important things you can do to make your article Search Engine Optimized:
For more SEO tips, check out my del.icio.us SEO bookmarks or check out all of the popular SEO bookmarks on del.icio.us.
The single most important thing we've done to increase our google pagerank and traffic is to submit articles to related Blog Carnivals. From wikipedia:
A Blog Carnival is a type of blog event. It is similar to a magazine, in that it is dedicated to a particular topic, and is published on a regular schedule, often weekly or monthly. Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of a blog article that contains permalinks links to other blog articles on the particular topic.
Having articles in blog carnivals provides 2 main benefits. First, blog carnival readers are directed to the articles and, second, the articles get linked to which increases the Pagerank for those articles.
Here is a list of blog carnivals we commonly submit articles to and the number of readers that tend to get referred to any single article:
Note that these numbers vary to some extent based upon which blog hosts any particular carnival.
- The Storyblogging carnival: ~15 readers
- Carnival of the Godless: ~100 readers
- Ringing of the Bards (poetry): ~10 readers
Here are some traffic statistics to give you an idea of how we're growing. We're using Google Analytics to collect and display this information.
This graph shows the number of vistors per day we've gotten since the beginning of this year. We have had a small but steady growth curve to where we are now averaging about 50 visitors per day.
The spikes are largely caused by articles being popular in the social bookmarking sites or coincide with blog carnivals linking to our articles. The largest spike we've experienced was 140 visitors and occured in the Fall when Bob Seitz's Global Warming article was reviewed and linked to by (an evidently popular) stumbleupon.com user [this is not pictured in this graph].
Our pageviews per visit are holding pretty steady at about 1.5. This means that, on average, one out of every 2 visitors checks out 2 articles before leaving the site.
As you can see here, the vast majority of our visitors come from google searches. Next most are viewers coming directly. We've only shared the "ReasonAndRhyme.com" url to friends and acquaintences so those visitors basically count as "word-of-mouth". The "gabbly.com" referrer is the from the "Chat" feature which basically only I use (I think!) so that's probably only me. "Reddit.com", "stumbleupon.com", "del.icio.us", and "digg.com" are social news and social bookmarking sites (more about these in a later article). They refer many readers but only reddit shows up in our top 10 this year. "drsanity.blogspot.com" is a host of a very popular humor blog carnival where Richard May's "NASA Plans To Construct Earth Base" article was included. The rest of the top 10 referral sources are basically search related. I'll talk more about how we work to increase our position in search results in a later article.
| Article | Unique Views | Pageviews | Avg Time | % Exit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Sonnet | 250 | 293 | 00:04:48 | 83.62% |
| Epic Poetry | 128 | 158 | 00:03:52 | 77.85% |
| Valentine's Day Card | 88 | 116 | 00:02:31 | 66.38% |
| NASA Plans to Construct Earth Base | 96 | 104 | 00:01:00 | 89.42% |
| label: poetry | 78 | 96 | 00:01:18 | 70.83% |
| The Statistics of Stereotyping | 72 | 82 | 00:07:39 | 84.15% |
| label: Maria Claudia Faverio | 64 | 82 | 00:01:45 | 50.00% |
| Must We Grow Old? | 71 | 80 | 00:01:22 | 85.00% |
| label: Richard May | 56 | 75 | 00:03:06 | 52.00% |
| Atheism Defined | 61 | 73 | 00:04:06 | 69.86% |
| Mnemonics and Blindfold Chess | 54 | 72 | 00:04:46 | 68.06% |
| Number Series Puzzle | 42 | 66 | 00:02:30 | 51.52% |
| Winter Poem | 54 | 60 | 00:01:10 | 85.00% |
| label: Brian Schwartz | 39 | 54 | 00:01:57 | 51.85% |
| label: Dan Barker | 35 | 51 | 00:02:41 | 45.10% |
I've dropped the direct homepage hits from this list but there were 584 uniq views and 799 pageviews directly to the homepage. In a later article I'll describe what seem to be the primary causes for articles to get views. For now, I'll list briefly how I think the top 15 became the top 15:
- The Sonnet
- Epic Poetry: These are very complete and authoritative articles on the title subjects. People find it in google searches and read it once they click on the article. Epic Poetry was included in "Ringing of the Bards", a poetry blogging carnival.
- Valentine's Day Card: The simple article title along with our blog title "Reason and Rhyme" caused google to put this article on the front page of searches for terms like "Valentine's Day rhyme".
- NASA Plans to Construct Earth Base: This article was included in the very popular drsanity.blogspot.com humor blog carnival.
- label: poetry: It seems that our blog title, "Reason and Rhyme", combined with the number of high quality poems and poetry related articles we post cause google to put us fairly high in poetry and rhyming related searches. Especially this label page which contains all of our poetry related articles.
- The Statistics of Stereotyping: This article is a very simple and strong discussion of the topic which followed onto Albert Frank's article on the related statistics. It was submitted to digg and reddit. And, because of its simple and appropriate title, it shows up near the top of a search for "the statistics of stereotyping" which is a hot topic this decade.
- label: Maria Claudia Faverio: Maria's articles on different forms of poetry are popular. This causes her label page which contains all of those articles and her poetry also to be popular.
- Must We Grow Old?: This article has been included in several health related blog carnivals and has been submitted to digg and reddit.
- label: Richard May: Richard has written a lot of articles and, again, his NASA humor piece was included in the humor blog carnival.
- Atheism Defined: This piece shared by Dan Barker was included in the popular Carnival of The Godless and has been linked from several atheism related blogs.
- Mnemonics and Blindfold Chess: This topic is commonly searched for and this is a very strong article about it.
- Number Series Puzzle: Commonly searched for.
- Winter Poem: This was included in the "Ringing of The Bards" poetry blogging carnival and is searched for regularly. Again, having "rhyme" in our blog title seems to help our poetry articles show up higher in search results.
- label: Brian Schwartz: Brian has written many articles and they are searched for and found. His Winter Poem above, Club Kids, and Crawpappy's bar articles are commonly read. Also, recently, people have been google searching on a teenager named Brian Schwartz who was killed in an avalanche in Utah :( .
- label: Dan Barker: Several of Dan's articles have been shared in The Carnival of The Godless and Dan has high visibility as co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
We've updated our look to be more unique and contemporary and in order to support new features. We've added "help" for providing information about certain sidebars. You can get "help" by hovering your mouse over a sidebar (or the "Share It" post section) for a second. We've also added two new sidebar modules: Shared Links and Freethought Radio.
The Shared Links sidebar displays the most recent del.icio.us bookmarks tagged with "RnRLink". If you come across something on the web you'd like to share on our blog, simply tag it in del.icio.us with the "RnRLink" tag and it will show up in the sidebar. (You will need to have or obtain a free del.icio.us account in order to submit Links).
The Freethought Radio sidebar displays the most recent podcasts of Freethought Radio which features Reason and Rhyme contributor Dan Barker.
This is my friend Jon Bolton's cover of the song "Forever" that he did for his girlfriend for Valentine's day today! Jon played all the instruments and did all the vocals.
Jon Bolton plays in "The Beatniks" and "The Herding Cats" bands. The picture of Jon above is from when "The Herding Cats" played the main stage at The Chicago House of Blues.
"Forever" is originally by John Stamos, perhaps still best known for playing Jesse Katsopolis on the TV sitcom "Full House" but is also on ER and has toured playing drums for the Beach Boys. You can clearly hear the Beach Boys influence in this song. You can see the music video on YouTube.
Reason and Rhyme is in it's second quarter of life. We've posted over 100 articles, submitted about 50 times to 10-20 different blog carnivals, submitted articles to social bookmarking and article popularity sites and more. We have learned a lot about creating and managing a new blog and I'll try to share all of the major lessons with you, our authors and readers in this post and several future posts. There is a lot to cover! Therefore, I will cover various aspects including our traffic statistics and attributes, what articles get read the most, tips for finding readers, blog carnivals, our site features for connecting with readers, and more.
The most popular and successful blogs are blogs about blogs. That seems both sad and understandable; with over 50 million blogs out there, somebody needs to tell us what blogging is, where to find them, and how to do it. More generally, the most successful blogs are about the Internet and technology. Anything about Google; Search Engine Optimization; web advertising; personal technology including cell phones, personal computers, digital cameras, etc.; Web 2.0; social bookmarking; all are blogged about ad infinitum it seems. And that's all well and good. But boring.
And, that's not us. I'm very pleased with where we live in the blog ecosystem. The uniqueness of our authors and their contributions gives Reason and Rhyme it's distinct identity which is as it should be. There are certainly still many other similar blogs but I'm proud of how Reason and Rhyme compares and our growth shows that there is a place for our creations in the blogosphere.
Tonight while putting my son to bed I shared some thoughts I have from time to time in terms he could understand...
It seems that games will be able to get as realistic as our everyday perceptions. A joint effort between MIT and Harvard has produced rudimentary, synthetic eye interfacing optic nerves with external cameras on eye-glasses. There are several other projects that are working on brain implants for other human-aiding tasks such as allowing quadriplegics to work with a computer. While actual working systems are rudimentary, there don't seem to be any insurmountable physical or technical barriers to interfacing our perceptive organs to synthetic systems.
Using our current perception interfacing agents, joysticks, keyboards, and mice, many people choose to inhabit rich synthetic universes. These universes include Everquest, The Sims, Star Wars Galaxies, Second Life, etc. There are many more.
It is thus easy to imagine a future where we can choose to inhabit a synthetic universe.
From my training in acting and zen, I've found there is a difference to what we think of as acting and what it is to be. One of the main acting guys basically said [good] acting is accepting imaginary circumstance as real and then simply being human.
In zen, we practice kung-ans (Japanese: koans). In a simple sense, these are mind puzzles; for example, one of the most common is, "What is the sound of one hand clapping." These are the lessons taught and learned in Zen. More deeply, these are gates for your self (or soul) to pass through that must be experienced to be answered. There is no room for hesitation, irrelevant thought or acting.
Be it the attainment of life lessons or otherwise, it is easy to imagine a person choosing to embed themselves fully into a simulated universe leaving memories of the real universe behind. Furthermore, for the secret of the real universe to be kept, this simulated universe must only contain others who have fully embedded themselves (i. e., w/o memories of the "real" universe).
At this point, assuming our senses are interfaced and input simulated perfectly and the other players in the synthetic universe are likewise, the synthetic universe is indistinguishable from our own real universe. Also, assuming the rest of our bodies can be simulated (or left behind), that doesn't leave much cause for keeping it around in the real universe.
Astonishingly, if civilization progresses and is able to support a synthetic universe as I've described above, we are likely simulations in a game now.
Ok, so now we have "The Matrix": big deal.
Getting back to my son, he had no response to this. It didn't seem to upset him but I think I succeeded in giving him his first mind fu"¦, er, twist. He was thoughtful about it but didn't have much to say. I may have added to his families' current and future therapy bills but hopefully it's for the good
What my mind's been playing with that I haven't shared with my son (for good reason!) is how religion makes a hell of a lot more sense when given we are living in a simulation. God? He's the fella that created our simulation. Jesus? He used the real universe's Instant Messaging system; yup he was able to get a direct account from here. He's like the first guy that got a gmail account and started inviting the rest of us into the system. Buddha? Whether you're synthetic or not doesn't really change what you are: apples are sweet.
General simulated reality info from wikipedia including quality external links.
by Sean J. Vaughan
Something that has been on my mind from time to time is the ironic difference between what Americans like in their epic war movies vs. the way America (well, the leadership) acts in the real world with regard to war.
A recent example this millenium is "The Lord of the Ring: The Two Towers". Besides the obvious mistake that I and many folks I know make of calling the evil two towers "the twin towers", America clearly resembles the evil side much more than the good side. The ring clearly represents technology and the way the "good" side looks at technology vs the way the "evil" side looks at technology eerily maps to how many in the Muslim countries (including bin Laden) and western civilization view technology; namely: If "the good" use the ring they succumb to its power and become evil; if "the evil" use the ring they can and likely will destroy the world. Even the manner in which "the good" eventually win the day partly utilizes "terrorist" methodology: common creatures (hobbits) infiltrating the "evil" territories and destroying the ultimate weapon (the ring) which has the side affect of weakening and helping in the defeat of the evil enemy.
The scariest example of this irony is with Star Wars (at least the first three movies). The imagery of the destruction of the Twin Death Stars eerily coincides with the imagery of the twin towers' destruction; not to mention the actual methods employed by The Rebels and Al Quaeda to produce said destruction. The scariest bit of all is how America's government fully embraced the relationship by terming the retaliation "America Strikes Back," a clear link to "Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back". Why are we so eager to embrace the evil side?
Another weaker example is "Gladiator" where Maximus goes from being a celebrated Roman war leader to a lowly slave gladiator who sticks it to the resident Ceasar. Weakly analogous to Bin Laden working with American interests against The Soviet Union only to "turn against" us later.
Movies provide a very good mirror for what people's perceptions are. The more popular the movie the more people likely relate to the protagonist or message. Based on this information, it seems clear that Americans should be able to relate to the Al Quaeda situation fairly readily. (Not necessarily agree with it, but at least have some understanding for their plight).
It makes sense that Senator Murray and Representative McDermott from the Seattle area would have more understanding than other congressional leaders about this: the new popularization of coffee originated around here and was first popularized in Muslim countries. (A pretty major shift in Islam was caused by disagreement between the religious leaders and "the people" on whether consumption of coffee was "ok" or not as I understand it).
by Sean J. Vaughan
I have been practising Zen Buddhism for two years.
An interesting paradigm to keep in mind when considering religion is whether it is a subjective or objective religion. Objective religions are religions that describe religious ideas as being outside of our own minds or selves. Belief in gods or a god outside of oneself is an attribute of an objective religion. Eastern religions (or philosophies) are (or tend to be) subjective. The Buddha is not something outside of our own minds or selves.
It indeed seems to me that objective religions are a dying breed. Science seems to be gaining a monopoly in objective thought and all for the better in my opinion.
I myself have been thinking about experiences that are not objective or scientific in the sense that others cannot confirm them. I think it's safe to say that most of us have experiences like these. Science calls these things "hallucinations" and I really have no problem with that description, per se. The problem I do have with that description is that by calling these experiences hallucinations attaches negative connotations to them. Hallucinations are admitted as "normal" only if they come with drugs, illness, or whatever.
When I meditate I see funky colors, and walls look "electric", and all sorts of "stuff." From the first person perspective they are as "real" as (scientific) "reality". Actually, from the first person perspective they are more real than scientific reality because we can not practically experience all that science tells us is true.
I believe that all of our experiences (including hallucinations) can ultimately be complimented by scientific explanations. For example, science can (or will) be able to tell me that when I experienced viewing red this cluster of neurons went ratta-tat-tat. Science could also tell me whether I hallucinated it or whether red was really "out there." Science will eventually be able to explain in technical terms when I experience anger that I'm not understanding that the creep who swore at me has an ulcer which caused 'A' which caused 'B' which caused me to split my knuckles on his chin. As processing power improves hopefully it can save my knuckles or, even better, the swearing, or (even better) the ulcer, or even better, ... The problem is that the science for many of my experiences simply does not exist yet or I don't have time to learn it.
Before the last couple of years I chose to ignore any "abnormal" experiences and label them as bullshit. As it turns out, that is a poor coping strategy! I think science, by its very nature, has a way of minimizing the role of the first-person perspective and that's sad. I'm not stating whether paranormal things happen in the third-person scientific world or not, but paranormal experiences do occur in the first person and are an important part of being human.
I now see science as simply a tool for myself. If my head hits a wall two or three times I can compare notes with others to learn sumpthin'. Or maybe I already read about walls and just avoid 'em because they aren't terribly attractive to begin with. Or maybe I've read about walls but still choose to push on one for experience's sake.
Back to religions...they adapt. Above I said that objective religions are a dying breed but, in fact, they are simply morphing into subjective religions as science takes over their territory. Frankly, if religion helps people without limiting an individual's own ability to help other people (of all, or any, faith) then that's fine with me. (If I were a homeless person though, giving me food with a sermon attached wouldn't really be an example of a religion helping me although it would be an example of an individual helping).
What do others think or feel about this?
Much of what I've discussed here is similar to what I've read in The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus by the way.
The Author Drives A Toy Truck For His Son
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