jazzfes

The fragrance of joss sticks hangs in the air, while in the background there is the constant murmur of monks reciting their mantras. When you experience a ceremony in the Golden Temple of Elista, you'd be forgiven for believing that you're no longer in Europe – but you definitely haven't left the continent. Elista is the capital of Kalmykia. The autonomous federal republic of Russia lies between the Caucasus and Caspian Sea in the southern Russian steppes, and geographically is part of Europe. It is the only predominantly Buddhist region – a piece of Asia on the European continent.

When I tell someone that I run a centre that brings philosophy into children’s lives, much of the time I’m greeted with puzzlement, and sometimes open scepticism. How can children do philosophy? Isn’t it too hard for them? What are you trying to do, teach Kant to kindergarteners? Or, somewhat more suspiciously, what kind of philosophy are you teaching them?

These reactions are understandable, because they stem from very common assumptions – about children and about philosophy. Central to our work at the Center for Philosophy for Children at the University of Washington is the conviction that we ought to challenge beliefs about children’s limited capacities, and to expand our understanding of the nature of philosophy and who is capable of engaging in it. As one seven-year-old put it: ‘In philosophy, we’re growing our minds.’

Most of our philosophy sessions with children are in public elementary schools; the aim is to discover what topics the children want to think about, and to foster discussions and reflection about these subjects. I don’t think of what I do as teaching philosophy, though. The point is not to educate children about the history of philosophy, nor to instruct them in the arguments made by professional philosophers.

Modern mindfulness strips Buddhism of its spiritual core. We need an ethics of reincarnation for an interconnected world

I quite like the podcast and the thoroughness in referencing things. The podcast is certainly opinioned but it makes its stance pretty clear.

Intro to the linked episode:

"The emptiness of self is a Zen teaching that may seem rather abstract and philosophical, or even kind of nihilistic, depressing, or disorienting. Why does this matter? In brief, knowing the true nature of our self is what liberates us from fear and suffering.

First I’ll give a brief overview of the Buddhist teachings on the emptiness of self, and then I’ll explore what they mean to our daily life and practice."

"Most “free” websites subsist by selling ads or selling user data. Others do it by putting all the good stuff behind paywalls. Lichess doesn’t do any of that and never will. Almost 6 years ago, Lichess founder Thibault explained why Lichess is free - and what that means. A lot can change in 6 years but this is one thing that hasn't and never will.

This is our unbreakable promise to you, our users:

Lichess will never have ads.
Lichess will never sell our user’s data.
Lichess will always be 100% free of charge.

"

So when my kid was a bit over a year old, it became clear that there was an unprecedented sportsman in the making!

I immediately went out and bought a balance bike similar to this one:

Anyway, turns out that no amount of tape, even construction style one, was enough to keep the little one on the bike in an upright position at a reasonable speed. After a couple of bumps, I decided that the reasonable thing is to wait a little.

After what felt like eternity, but probably wasn't too long, he started to use it more and more. Jumps were made over garden hoses. Little hills were mastered, gaining more and more speed.

At about two / three years of age, my kid was pushing his balance bike with verve downhill on skate tracks!

He absolutely learnt to love it super quick and he still uses it now and then while learning how to use a peddle bike. The balancing side of the peddle bike worked pretty much from the start as a result of the balance bike. The peddle bike is a fair bit bigger however and he needs to build up some confidence with it though.

Anyway, I can wholeheartedly recommend a proper balance bike for toddlers. They are great fun and give them a great sense of freedom.

Things to look out for:

• Ensure it is light weight... you will carry it for extended times
• Get a proper two wheel one. The three wheel ones don't give them a chance to learn the balancing mechanics.
• Make sure they wear a helmet
• Great way for a parent to maintain some form of exercise, while you are chasing after the kid
• Once they learn how to balance, put trust in them regarding how fast they are going.... they can go pretty fast for sure! I've seen this not only with mine, but also others. Obviously look for a save environment where nothing serious happens if they loose control

I've got very little lemmy experience in general, so this is a bit of an experiment for me.

The experiment is about sharing parenting experiences, and discuss how to survive and enjoy parenting while getting better at it.

It's also about managing partnerships that may have caused parenting and/or are impacted by it.

Let's discuss our problems, solutions, and breakdowns.

Parenting has been easily the most intense relationship I've had. It's enjoyable and fu**ing stressful. I wouldn't want to miss it yet I'd love it to be easier....

Can we work towards this?

Parents of lemmy, unite!

I installed FreeBSD a few days ago. So far the experience is pretty good:

While it starts with a very minimal system, it's relatively easy to build it up to something "normal", in my case a KDE desktop.

The biggest change compared to linux I have to get used to is that the documentation seems often to be better than a search on the internet.

Case in point was my 60 minute effort fixing a DNS leak with my VPN:

After spending some time managing the openvpn connection and automating it on startup, I noticed that I'm leaking DNS...

Spent some time searching the net, until I found and followed 30.7.2. DNS Server Configuration in the handbook, which explains how to set the system DNS. After getting the public DNS from my VPN provider, and following the instructions in the manual, the leaks were gone...

I remember having chased DNS leaks in linux for weeks.... Quite happy so far :)

Currently reading this one and I find it to be a really nice intro to meditation.

My background is that I dabbled in meditation practices, Buddhist and non-Buddhist for some time without ever getting too serious about it. More recently I established a weekly practice and this book certainly gave it a boost.

Definitely can recommend.

Looking into FreeBSD at the moment and quite like what I read so far. Looked for books and got this...

Thought the opinionated search engine was quite funny :)

Will still install it anyway... :P