Scott Brightwell dot Org

My dangerous idea is that what’s needed to attain optimal brain performance — with or without prior brain exercise — is a 24-hour period of absolute solitude. By absolute solitude I mean no verbal interactions of any kind (written or spoken, live or recorded) with another human being. I would venture that a significantly higher proportion of people reading these words have tried skydiving than experienced one day of absolute solitude. Leo Chalupa

From the edge.org “Dangerous Question of 2006″ survey. This is the best idea I’ve heard in a while.

“Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left,” said co‑author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.  UCLA News

Great article.

The first version of IBM’s flagship DS8000 storage array, shipping since March, contains a bug that automatically shuts down the entire system without warning every 49 days, users in Europe and North America report.

IBM informed iT Austria of the problem on May 27 and by May 30 the firm had received microcode revision 6.0.0.388 to fix the problem. Unfortunately the repair was a disruptive upgrade. Another outage, this time for 22 hours, occurred when iT Austria needed to add a second frame to the DS8000 to expand its capacity. Several microcode versions later iT Austria is crossing its fingers that the system stays up and running.

As a storage professional, my only response to IBM is Oh. My. God.

What is my praise before Thee? I have not heard the cherubim singing,
that is the lot of souls sublime,
but I know how nature praises thee.

In winter I have thought about the whole earth praying quietly to Thee in the
silence of the moon,
wrapped around in a mantle of white,
sparkling with diamonds of snow.

I have seen how the rising sun rejoiced in Thee,
and choirs of birds sang forth glory.

I have heard how secretly the forest noises Thee abroad,
how the winds sing,
the waters gurgle,
how the choirs of stars preach of Thee
in serried motion through unending space.

A poem written by Archpriest Grigori Petrov (Gregory Petrov) shortly
before his death in a Siberian prison camp in 1942.

A common image for popular accounts of the “The Mind” is a brain in a bell jar. The message is that inside that disembodied lump of neural tissue is everything that is you.

It’s a scary image but misleading. A far more dangerous idea is that brains cannot become minds without bodies, that two-way interactions between mind and body are crucial to thought and health, and the brain may partly think in terms of the motor actions it encodes for the body’s muscles to carry out. Alun Anderson

www.edge.org is presenting thinkers around the world this year with the question “What is your dangerous idea?” Many of the psychologists’ answers are variations of “there is no God,” but many contributers deal with issues of science, society, and the person.

The above is very similar to Orthodox Christian view of the integrated nature of the “person.” We often speak of the mind, body, and soul as if they were distinct and separate, but they’re not. They’re aspects of the single hypostasis that is each person. There is no “mind” separate from the “body.” The “soul” is as integral to the body and the mind as they are to it. They’re inseparable. That’s why “death” is such an unnatural condition and is the ultimate conclusion of the sickness of sin (which fundamentally is our desire to individuate ourselves from the source of live.. God).

It’s easy to search for the missing component in your storage network with Storage Scope with a little up-front planning. Create a report that contains the values you’d like returned from your search and the field you’d like to search. If for instance, you’re trying to figure out where a particular WWPN is plugged in, name the report “Search by WWPN.” Be sure to hit Next while creating the report until you get to the Filters configuration page. Select the field you’d like to search, the method of search (ie: contains ignore case) and put a search term in the last field. You can create very complex searches if you pay attention to this page. Save and Open the report.

Only the data that matches your search string will be returned. Now, whenever you want to search for a piece of a WWPN from the oft-forgotten server, just open this report. At the top of the report screen, there’s a drop-down list containing other reports, and options for this one. Select Edit Filters from the drop-down list. Change the text of the search to be the last 6 digits or so of the WWPN, and you’ll receive only a few matches (if any). Return to this report again and again whenever you need to find components by WWPN. Other suggestions are “Search by Name,” “Search by Zone,” “Search by Volume Group.”

First post.  Cool.