John Borwick’s blog

In Professor Balaban’s class, we talked about the Coconut Monk, a monk who sat in a tree for a very long time and eventually took a vow of silence and started a community on an island. Here are some links to sites mentioning the monk.

• Article in Vu Trinh
• Tourist’s experience around the island
• Movie about the Coconut Monk
• blogging about the “unhinged” monk
• Tours of Con Phung island

The Dalai Lama talks to engineers.

the Dalai Lama said, “Cosmology, neurobiology, physics, psychology — these are the things that Buddhist scholars really need to study.”

But before the audience could nod in agreement, he added, “In order to refute them!”

From the Christian Science fair winners:

1st Place: “Life Doesn’t Come From Non-Life”

Patricia Lewis (grade did an experiment to see if life can evolve from non-life. Patricia placed all the non-living ingredients of life - carbon (a charcoal briquet), purified water, and assorted minerals (a multi-vitamin) - into a sealed glass jar. The jar was left undisturbed, being exposed only to sunlight, for three weeks. (Patricia also prayed to God not to do anything miraculous during the course of the experiment, so as not to disqualify the findings.) No life evolved. This shows that life cannot come from non-life through natural processes.