Tricycle | Awake in the World

Thanks to our friend Tom Armstrong of Thoughts Chase Thoughts for pointing us to a New York Times piece on Google engineer Tan Chade-Meng, a founding father of Buddhism online with the venerable site "What do you think, my friend?" (Tom points out that the NYT piece makes no mention of Mr. Tan's ur-Buddhist webwork.) Instead, the article focuses on pictures of the Google engineer with celebrities visiting the Google campus. You can see his public gallery here. The picture at right (click for a bigger version) shows Tan Chade-Meng (far left) with the Dalai Lama (the guy in the robes.) Not sure about the folks in between. This is not a representative picture, actually, but we're on a photo-of-the-Dalai-Lama kick today. For more representative pics, see the Times piece or Thoughts Chase Thoughts. "What do you think, my friend?" has been around so long it may be taken for granted, but it was one of the first signposts on a lonely road for Buddhists venturing onto the interweb, and its un-dogmatic, kind, and wise tone set the stage for civil discourse on thorny Buddhist issues. So thank you very much for that!

Climate Change / Increasing Inter-Relatedness Watch: An increase in global demand for milk? (We remember all about how dastardly dairy is, right?) But gee, isn't there pretty much an increase in global demand for most things, what with the world population booming and all? I'm sort of led to believe that rising fuel costs lead to rising costs for everything. Or in other words, prices rising and falling are all tied to together, inter-relatedness again. (So in other words, there's no story here.)

- Philip Ryan, Webmaster