A few cool brain maps and infographics

 Way cool brain maps created by a scientist, who is also a religious zealot. 

The stressed out brain, cool brain map and descriptions

How We Lose It

Neural circuits responsible for conscious self-controlare highly vulnerable to even mild stress. When they shut down,primal impulses go unchecked and mental paralysis sets in 

By Amy Arnsten, Carolyn M. Mazure and Rajita Sinha

Limbic system anatomy and physiology. It is involved in our behavioural and emotional responses. By Epomedicine.

From the Simply Psychology website

From The Science of Psychotherapy, the Limbic System

The HOPES Brain Tutorial (Text Version) Stanford University

Marvelous brain related infographics via 

Oren Gottfried, MD

@OGdukeneurosurg

Awesome look at Cranial Nerve Anatomy

A primer on the impact of AGE on the BRAIN from the Washington Post

Back roads to far towns

 The Japanese Zen poet nomad, Basho (1644-1694), wrote the beautiful words "back roads to far towns". 

MOON & SUN ARE PASSING FIGURES OF countless generations, and years coming or going wanderers too. Drifting life away on a boat or meeting age leading a horse by the mouth, each day is a journey and the journey itself home.

The book, Back Roads To Far Towns is readable, translated, online for free here. 

This is a marvelous back road in India, high up in the Himalayas in a small, remote region, called Spiti, on the Tibetan border.

Scary Road to Langza in Spiti Valley - Trans Himalayas

Kishtwar

Roadtrip - The world's most dangerous road - Pangi via Kishtwar

When I lived in Manali from 1978 to 1982, I used to take long walks in the mountains with my friend, a mountaineer, Tarachand Thakur. Like this: 

Across the Forgotten Valleys | Uttarakhand

From the point of 1:50 in this video I walked this route on foot, alone, carrying a 35lb backpack. 

My eyes had been so used to being saturated with the complexities of the urban landscape, faces, people's bodies, their gaits, expressions, all the architectural details of the various buildings, dogs being walked, cars, windows, the pace of traffic, the many businesses withe their wares on display, the light reflected off glass. In this new world of the higher Himalayas, my eyes saw the lack of everything vividly, as well as what was there to be seen, the dun colored vegetation, the powdery dirt, all the shapes of the mountainsides with their boulders, lichen, every plant, the silhouettes of the mountains, the stark shadows. Immediately, I understood why the Tibetan people who lived here craved colorful accents in their clothing, bright turquoise or neon fuchsia lining of their brown or black wool chubas, blood red coral and honey colored amber necklaces, multi-colored striped aprons. I felt color starved at first, latching on hungrily to any purple azalea or white edelweiss wildflower hidden in the tawny colored turf. But then my mind adjusted to the more monochrome vistas. 

It felt strongly as if I were in the land, a visitor, that the land had the power, not like in a place dominated by people. The place had a strong presence which dominated everything and commanded immersive attention. 

A hummingbird laid eggs in Steph's mobile

 

A hummingbird laid eggs in Steph's mobile

 Today my friend, Stephanie Bader, posted that a hummingbird laid a couple of eggs in a mobile she has hanging outside on her porch. How cool is that! 

"Ms Hummer decided to build her nest this year in the shell mobile just outside our sliding door. She's incubating 2 eggs."

The Evolution of Alphabets

The Evolution of Alphabets

Dr. C. George Boeree

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Nearly all modern alphabets are descended from an alphabet invented 4000 years ago, probably by a group of people related to the ancient Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Canaanites, living in what is now the Sinai desert.  They got the idea from the Egyptians, but used their own simplified pictures to represented consonant sounds.  The Phoenicians and others of the region simplified the pictures further and often rotated them, but if you use your imagination, you can still make out where most of the 22 letters came from.  If you turn the A with the point down, for example, you can see a representation of an ox head.

[To see the Phoenician alphabet, click here!]

All the letters were for consonants, which is reasonable for Semitic languages like Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, and even Egyptian. Even aleph and ayin actually represent the glottal sounds that preceded the A's.  Greek (and most other languages) desperately need to represent vowels as well, so they took a few of the consonants they didn't need, and turned them into vowels -- aleph being the obvious example.  They then added a few symbols of their own to represent extra sounds they needed.  Three unused letters were retained in the Greek numbering system.

The Phoenicians, like the Hebrews and Arabs today, wrote from right to left.  The Greeks originally did the same, then changed to a system where they changed direction every line, and finally to the present system of left to right. This has passed down to all the modern European alphabets.

The Latin alphabet, ancestor of most western European alphabets, is derived from the Greek, but was also influenced by the nearby Etruscan version of the alphabet. Over the centuries, extra letters were invented by varying older ones, or reintroducing Greek letters such as K and Y.  It wasn't until the middle ages that small letters came into being, usually based on more cursive versions of the capital letters.

The alphabets of south and southeast Asia are all derived from the Brahmi alphabet, which in turn is loosely based on the Aramaic.  With a far greater number of consonants, the ancient Indians created many of their letters, and organized them phonetically.  The creativity continued as the idea moved eastward, and many of the later alphabets bear little resemblance to the earlier ones (see below).

Another way in which alphabets have developed involves the creativity of one or two specific inventors. Examples incluid the pre-cyrillic alphabet glagolitic, and the alphabets for Armenian and Georgian:

The only independently invented "true" alphabet is the beautiful Korean hangul. One very noticable feature is that the letters are arranged to fit inside a "box". For example, la Korean word for honeybee (kkulbeol) is written as 꿀벌, not ㄲㅜㄹㅂㅓㄹ.

There are also a number of syllabaries (where each symbol represents a syllable rather than a single phoneme) that were independently invented, including two for Japanese, one for Cherokee, and one for the Cree and Inuit of Canada.

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Examples of the variety of Brahmi-derived scripts of south and southeast Asia:

Evolution of the alphabet

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An infographic I drew back in 1999, my cluttered tabletop theory, Essential Elements of a Human Being

 

An excellent addition to this infographic

Fred Coulson

I'm thinking there's something missing here-- the desire to be close to non-human-fabricated things. Animals and plants. Digging in the dirt. Watching things grow. I know these things could appear under several of these rubrics, e.g. survival force, physical health, etc, but I think they deserve a plate of their own on the cluttered tabletop. This isn't a critique, just something I observed after I stopped being a city-dweller and moved to the country.

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• Love

Moravian missionary socks, knitted in Kullu, Manali, Keylong, Lahaul, Spiti in the Indian Himalayas

 Personal anecdote.

A century after Moravian missionaries came to the part of the Indian Himalayas, where I lived for six years in the middle 1970s, the local Indians were still knitting the kinds of hilariously garish socks the missionaries taught them how to make. The socks were typically decorated in neon colored patterns, often with rows of little swastikas, the ancient Hindu symbol highjacked by the Nazis. Enough tourists were horrified by the innocent use of swastikas that the locals have since learned not to incorporate that into the designs.

In the remote Himalayan provinces of Lahaul and Ladakh, during the six months of winter, several months of the year are snowed under. The roads are covered and the villagers spend the winter at home, sitting around the tandoor stove, living on fruit, vegetables and meat set out to dry in the summer months, and knitting.

The socks knitted in winter are sold to tourists in the lower Himalayas in the summer. Unfortunately, in the 1970s anyway, the short fiber wool used to knit the socks unravelled quickly and the socks rarely lasted more than a few wears. Worse, was that the dyes used for the neon colored wool, invariably ran. If one made the mistake, as I did a number of times, of washing even one pair of Moravian style socks with any other clothing, all clothing would come out accidentally tie dyed. One could recognize friends who had made the same mistake when meeting them and their once beige sweater was now partly pink, partly green.

When I lived in the Himalayas, finding wool socks was surprisingly difficult. Indians apparently didn't have wool socks, so travelers to the mountains in winter were tempted to get the Moravian socks and learned to regret it.

I wonder if the socks, which look very much the same now as they looked before, have improved over the decades.

Map of Lahaul:

https://tinyurl.com/2p9cpzpe

https://en.wikipedia.org/.../Bible_translations_into_Tibetan

Lahaul is way up in the India Himalayas and there are many small, remote villages.

Classic Moravian style knitted socks. The blue wool is natural and the neon design is made of "cashmilon"acrylic mix yarn.

"Left: the left-facing swastika is a sacred symbol in the Bon and Mahāyāna Buddhist traditions. Right: the right-facing swastika appears commonly in Hinduism, Jainism and Sri Lankan Buddhism"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika

Lahauli women sitting around a tandoor, wood burning stove, which is the way rooms are warmed and food is prepared in the Himalayas.

The Moravian Mission house in Keylong, Lahaul, India. Way up on the Tibetan Plateau. This is how it looked in the late 1800s.

Women from Lahaul, India, wearing the outfits the Moravian missionaries from Germany taught them to wear back in the 1800s. The women in Lahaul still wear this style of clothing today.

Classic Moravian style knitted socks. The purple wool is natural and the neon design is made of "cashmilon"acrylic mix yarn.

Classic Moravian style knitted socks. The neon design is made of "cashmilon"acrylic mix yarn.

The Hindu deity, Ganesh with a swastika symbol of life in the middle.

Classic Moravian style knitted socks. The red wool is natural and the neon design is made of "cashmilon"acrylic mix yarn.

Lahauli woman at a wedding party in Keylong, Lahaul, India, knitting Moravian style socks
Photo credit: Ramesh Lal

Women from Lahaul, India selling the Moravian style socks they knitted in winter.

Classic Moravian style knitted socks. The gray wool is natural and the neon design is made of "cashmilon"acrylic mix yarn.