| Vitruvian Mind |
| Life as it should be |
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Posted on March 2nd, 2009 by Mayur.
Categories: Business & Finance, Arts & Literature.
Who isn’t sick of reading another story about global recession? Layoffs, bankruptcies and bailouts – isn’t it so 2008? And yet the kick off to Milan Fashion week just might hint at a common cure to your crisis-driven concerns. Sex.
Suzy Menkes (Fashion Editor of the Herald Tribune) summed up the Milan Fashion Week 2009 (currently underway) in three phrases: ultashort-hem lines, skin-tight pants and pin-point heels. With the economy tanking, designers from Gucci to Pucci showed that when hedge-funds go bust and your credit line is cut-off, there is always one thing to rely on: sex.
And why not? Your don’t need a credit score or a credit default swap to enjoy sex. You just need a willing partner and your imagination. And if you play your cards right, it should cost you no more than a few hundred calories….
So the next time you’re worried about how the crisis is going to affect your life - resort to a good old-fashioned shag. You will be happier and healthier because the solution to your balance sheet dilemma just might be hiding under your bed sheets.
Posted on November 10th, 2008 by Myk.
Categories: Storytelling.
Phil and I are clearly on hiatus right now…working our tails off on Green Monkey, our balanced living company. We promise that when we return to VM, we are gonna bring the thunder. Until then, def check out our website and our blog there on all sorts of balanced living topics.
Faithfully, ~m
Posted on November 8th, 2008 by Mayur.
Categories: Business & Finance, Humor & Pop Culture.
The world is in recession. Oil at $50 a barrel. Deflation. Mass layoffs. Bank bailouts. Share crashes. And, just when you think you’ve now seen it all… a new maritime mugging crisis is brewing off the Somalian cost that involves… pirates. Yes. Pirates.
A few days ago, Somali pirates hijacked a 330 meter oil tanker with 2 mil barrels of oil worth around $100 mil – one of the most daring maritime heists the world has seen! No; Captain Jack Sparrow is not involved in this particular heist. Nor is this the new script for Pirates of the Carribean Part IV. This is the real deal. Ahoy mateys!
According to the FT, there have been 95 pirate attacks on vessels this year with 39 ships captured off the Somalian coast in the Gulf of Aden. Total Somalian Pirate revenues for this season: a lucrative $30 mil. Many of the swashbuckling adventurers are former Somali navy seals making them very proficient seamen with technical savoir-faire.
It is still unclear whether Pirate trainees must watch Pirates of the Carribean during their training. One thing for certain is that these Pirates need a wardrobe upgrade – ASAP. Skull and cross bones vest? A pirate hat at least?
It now appears that the Pirates have bigger ambitions than hijacking. They plan to acquire Citibank.
Whatever the outcome, lets hope the crews of the captured ships make it home safely.
Posted on September 15th, 2008 by Myk.
Categories: Science & Technology, Definitions.
Seriously, sometimes this stuff is useful:
Before you start reading this article, I want you to take a trip back into your past when you were being taught the decimal system. Personally, when I was in elementary school (in the 70’s/80’s), teachers used to use a column system to teach us about numbers:
[Thousands] | [Hundreds] | [Tens] | [One]
The number 1234 is - 1 Thousands, 2 Hundreds, 3 Tens and 4 Ones.
A few years later, we learned about the composition of the decimal system in a more complex way.
Thousands became 10^3 (10*10*10). Hundreds became 10^2 (10*10)… and so on. 1234 then became:
((1*10^3)+(2*10^2)+(3*10^1)+(4*10^0))
As you already know, counting in decimals is done by using 10 digits, from 0 to 9. Each time we jump a “column” (from 9 to 10), we add 1 digit to our total and reset all subsequent numbers to 0 (999 becomes 1000). The binary system works exactly the same way, but instead of using digits that goes from 0 to 9, we keep things simple and only use 0’s and 1’s, just like computers do. But the question you are probably asking yourself now is why do computers only use 0’s and 1’s? The answer is simple: electronic circuits. Circuits that make the wheel inside your computer turn can only have 2 states, on and off. Since a computer is mostly made out of electronic circuitry, it is logical that it uses the binary system to send, receive or compute information.
How does the binary system work?
Let’s start with what a binary number looks like: 01001010
“What the heck does this mean, and how do I represent this in more familiar decimal format” you ask. First, you have to know that each digit of a binary number is based on 2 to the power of x (as opposed to (more…)
Posted on September 6th, 2008 by Phil.
Categories: Media & Entertainment, Travel & Leisure, Philosophy & Spirituality, History & Politics, Philanthropy & Environment, Science & Technology, Arts & Literature, Humor & Pop Culture.
We’re finally home, unpacked, and settled back in after this year’s Burning Man. This was hands down my favorote year yet, and I think I speak for all of our crew when I say an amazing time was had by all.
Our friend Tomas was out there completing a five year retrospective art piece on photos of Burning Man from 2004-2008. He is still working on it, but the current gallery is already available at www.burningmanpix.info.
I encourage you to check it out, as the images are absoluely incredible.
Posted on August 22nd, 2008 by Phil.
Categories: Media & Entertainment, Travel & Leisure, Philosophy & Spirituality, Philanthropy & Environment, Arts & Literature, Humor & Pop Culture, Coming Events.
Yes, it’s that time of year again. Time to gather the goggles and glitter. Time to clean out the Camel Back and collect the costumes. Time to prepare ourselves for another week or survival camping on the playa. You guessed it - Burning Man.
At this very moment I am in Reno, NV, fresh from visits to Costco, Wal Mart, and Home Depot. About to grab my boxes and bike from the UPS Depot. Tomorrow the RV, final errands, and then its a half-day eastward journey into the middle of nowhere. Take a left turn after cell phone reception drops out, keep going for another couple hours, and then you’re getting close…
There have been myriad posts on this blog about Burning Man, so I’ll save further explanations here, save one - how to find us if you’re going to be out there. We are heading up the Villains & Virgins crew, which is part of Spanky’s Wine Bar, located at 5:00 and Esplanade. Once you get there, ask for the Pink Panther. If that makes any sense to you, then I’ll see you at the Bordello 
-PP
Posted on August 12th, 2008 by Mayur.
Categories: History & Politics.
This response from Mayur deserved posting all on its own:
“Perhaps certain men are simply pre-disposed to putting their hand in the cookie jar more than others. Perhaps its simple brain chemistry and evolution to blame.
Newsweek’s recent article on: “His Cheating Brain” offers a slightly different perspective. More specifically: monoamine oxidase A and testosterone may be the true culprits…. I summarize:
1. Many fallen politicians fit a personality type known as a “sensation seeker,” defined in the early 1970s. Sensation seekers crave novel and intense experiences more than other people do, and, as part of that, they tend to have many sexual partners. “They get a bigger kick out of things,” says Marvin Zuckerman, a pioneering psychologist and author of the 2006 book “Sensation Seeking and Risky Behavior.” There’s chemical evidence: sensation seekers have lower levels of monoamine oxidase A, which regulates the brain’s levels of dopamine, the “pleasure” neurotransmitter.
The problem is that they never seem to get enough excitement. “Their experiences have to be either very new or very intense, or both, or else they get very restless,” says Zuckerman. “When things get monotonous, they have to do something else to increase their arousal.” That’s the flipside of finding pleasure more pleasurable: for sensation seekers, boredom is also more boring.
2. Alpha males are high on testosterone, the hormone that underlies almost all the typical traits of the politico-sexual animal: high levels of testosterone make for a high sex drive, a love of risks, aggressiveness and competitiveness. “These people have a strong need to win at games, which is obviously important in power politics,” says Zuckerman.
Although it is still inexcusable behaviour, perhaps this perspective offers our politico-sexual animals a little bit of sympathy?”
Posted on August 8th, 2008 by Phil.
Categories: Philosophy & Spirituality, History & Politics.
What is it about people wanting what they know damn well they can’t have? Yes, this post was inspired by our friend Johnny Edwards getting called out for his extra-marital antics, but that’s just the tip of the tentacle. Having an affair is just about par for the course if you’re a politician, but considering the consequences of getting caught - and they almost always do - it staggers the imagination that so many still can’t keep their hands out of the cookie jar.
Something about human nature leads many people to covet that which they do not have, whether they really want it or not. It’s hard to come across someone that is truly happy with exactly what they have, and doesn’t want anything more. Bijan hit the nail on the head with his posting on happiness. We have access to more technology, more luxury, more of everything material thing than ever before in history - yet people still want more than they ever have before, and are less happy than they used to be. We focus to much on the negative, and need to embrace the positive.
What does it take to be happy? It is about having less and wanting less? Should we all become monks? Probably not. At the end of the day, I don’t know the answer, so the search continues…. For now I’ll just try to be mindful of the difference between needs and desires, be thankful for what I have, and maintain a balanced perspective. I’ll let you know how it goes
Posted on August 1st, 2008 by Bijan.
Categories: Media & Entertainment, Philosophy & Spirituality, History & Politics, Arts & Literature.
What is with the world these days? It is no question that death and violence will always sell like sex. We have an masochistic craving for morbidity and, whether we pretend to ignore it or not, we always take a peek. But what is most shocking, perhaps, is that we are constantly fed such slop not so much from entertainment media, but our own news outlets. Instead of really focusing on the issues that are affecting the state of our nation and world as a whole, we are continuously driving ourselves into a world of depression.
I like The Christian Science Monitor because it displays extremely relevant news. Don’t be frightened by its name - the website strictly states that it is not religious. From their website:
Everything in the Monitor is international and US news and features, except for one religious article that has appeared each day in The Home Forum section since 1908, at the request of the paper’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy.
It is important that we all keep a positive outlook on ourselves and our lives at all times. There are so many scenarios in which the famous FDR “only thing to fear is fear itself” quote is relevant. We will not be able to find our way out of a war, economic crisis and environmental disaster if we simply keep thinking about how sad we are and what a ‘terrible’ world we live in. Failures must be educational and successes must be celebrated.
Posted on July 30th, 2008 by Phil.
Categories: Science & Technology, Humor & Pop Culture.
The MonkeyLectric LED light system, invented by Instructables.com co-founder Dan Goldwater, turns spinning bike wheels into a psychedelic experience. Beyond the fact that I love the name “MonkeyLectric”, and that I have been dying to get these on my beach cruiser, I really enjoyed reading the essay that a man named Brownlee over at Boing Boing Gadgets wrote on the inherent weirdness of bicycles and the magic of these lights:
“I’ve always wanted a bike like that. Perhaps not one that turns onlookers minds into a gelatin-like slurry, but a surrealist bicycle. Because, if you think about it, there is something inherently weird about the bicycle. With its chittering gears, bristling spokes and spinning chains, there is something insect-like about its workings… a mental connection evoked by its best synonym, velocipede… a synonym which seems to share both etymologic and entomologic phylum with the centipede.
I’m not the only one to be fascinated by the bike’s innate oddity. Bicycles are often used in art as symbols of the inherently absurd: children’s books are filled with magic or living bikes, and the penny-farthing is such a marvelously implausible method of transportation that it is constantly used as the butt of jokes in television shows. The penny-farthing was also the logo of Patrick McGoohan’s hallucinatory sci-fi spy series, The Prisoner: the bike, by itself, was a symbol of the surrealness to come.
There are few pleasures in life purer than bicycling around on a bright, brisk day. This is because bikes are already just wonderfully odd inventions… making a bike even stranger is less an act of mechanical eccentricity than an attempt to pass the pleasure of riding one to the people you cycle past, emphasizing to them what they forgot: the bicycle’s marvelous strangeness.”
What the author of this fun little pondering of bicycles is probably not aware of is the one place on earth where there are more of these being used than anywhere else….. the place that the photo attached to his essay, and shown above, was taken… the place that I will be in less than 30 days. That’s right, Burning Man!
