People don’t trust autonomous vehicles, so Jaguar added googly eyes

therainstheyaredropping:

> The engineering team at Jaguar recently partnered with cognitive scientists to develop another solution: Put huge googly eyes on the front of its prototype vehicle. […]

> The team’s eyes aren’t actually googly eyes, of course. Jaguar Land Rover’s Future Mobility division designed a set of digital eyes that act like our own eyes, following the objects they “see.” These eyes don’t actually see anything, but they communicate how the car’s systems are tracking nearby objects through its camera and LiDAR sensors, a technology that is similar to radar and uses lasers, rather than radio waves, to sense objects. In theory, by following whatever moving object is directly in front of the car, these faux-eyes communicate to pedestrians and passersby that the vehicle has “seen” them.

Metaphors of struggle may just make the phantom dramas of the mind more solid, thus perpetuating the struggle, since even high spiritual warfare is one of the ego’s self-aggrandizing dreams.

Mitchell, Stephen. Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation

If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgement about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgement now. But if anything in thy own disposition gives thee pain, who hinders thee from correcting thy opinion?

Meditations

Willingly give thyself up to Clotho, one of the Fates, allowing her to spin thy thread into whatever things she pleases.

Meditations

sciencesourceimages:

Video Clip SS218421 (Tardigrade Walking Through Algae)

Tardigrade (Hypsibius dujardini) walking through algae, microscope view.

Tardigrades are commonly known as water bears or moss piglets. They are found in practically every habitat on Earth, from hot springs to beneath ice sheets, and are renowned for their toughness. 

See More Tardigrade Videos

Experiments have shown they can survive being frozen to nearly absolute zero and heated to 150 degrees Celsius. They have survived pressures of more than 6000 atmospheres, and have survived after prolonged exposure to the vacuum and radiation found in space. 

In unfavorable conditions they can dehydrate to 1% of their normal water content and remain alive in stasis for over a decade. In more normal conditions, they prefer moist environments where they feed on algae and bacteria. 

This tardigrade is often used as a model organism in biological research, and its genome is being sequenced.

© Sinclair Stammers / Science Source

(Source: sciencesource.com)

The advantage of the koan method is perhaps, that for general purposes, the other way is too subtle and too easily subject to misinterpretation–especially by monks who might all too readily use it as an excuse for loafing around the monastery while living off the donations of the devout laity. The his almost certainly why the emphasis of the T'ang masters on “not-seeking” gave way to the more energetic use of the koan as a means of exhausting the strength of the egoistic will. Bankei’s Zen without method or means offers no basis for a school or institution, since the monks may just as well go their way and take up farming or fishing. As a result no external sign of Zen is left; there is no longer any finger pointing at the moon or Truth–and this is necessary for the Bodhisattva’s task of delivering all beings, even thought it runs the risk of mistaking the finger for the moon.

The Way of Zen, Allan Watts

Awakening almost necessarily involves a sense of relief because it brings to an end the habitual psychological cramp of trying to grasp the mind with the mind, which in turn generates the ego with all its conflicts and defenses. In time, the sense of relief wears off–but not the awakening, unless one has confused it with the sense of relief and has attempted to exploit it by indulging in ecstasy. Awakening is thus only incidentally pleasant or ecstatic, only at first an experience of intense emotional release. But in itself it is just the ending of an artificial and absurd use of the mind… One method of muscular relaxation is to begin by increasing tension in the muscles so as to have a clear feeling of what not to do. In this sense there is some point in using the initial koan as a means of intensifying the mind’s absurd effort to grasp itself. But to identify satori with the consequent feeling of relief, with the sense of relaxation, is quite misleading, for the satori is the letting go and not the feeling of it. The conscious aspect of the Zen life is not, therefore, satori–not the “original mind"–but everything one is left free to do and to see and feel when the cramp in the mind has been released.

The Way of Zen, Allan Watts