• What is tzal.org?
Tzal.org is a blog that goes somewhat beyond the chronological, being a tool for the author to keep track and map concepts and ideas publicly (radical transparency), as well as an experiment in network semantics.

• What is interdp?
InterDP is a giant script developed in PHP to run tzal.org and other websites.

• Who is responsible for tzal.org and InterDP?
Eduardo Pinheiro, aka Padma Dorje, a Buddhist dabbler and philosophy undergrad student.

• Is this a Buddhist website?
A slice of it is. Which slice is rather difficult to determine.

• What are areas, categories and tags?
This division pertains to the ontology of InterDP: areas are aggregators of subjects the reader may wish to turn on and off (every article needs to be in one and not more than one area). Areas cannot be linked to, as they are mostly subtractive, that is, rather than wanting to read just one area, one would more frequently want not to show articles (posts) in one or two areas; categories can also agreggate subjects, but formally designate a group of articles that can belong to different areas, and an article can be ascribed to one, many or no categories. Categories can also be linked, and can even have a different template for the whole look, making it possible for them to become websites in themselves. While areas are few (in tzal.org there are only 6), categories can be in the order of hundreds; tags on the other hand are in the order of thousands. While categories agreggate expressions to articles, tags aggregate articles to expressions. These expressions can be later semantically networked, that is, their semantic relationships can be assigned.

• Why it is necessary to confirm comments by email?
Moderation is mostly needed to prevent spam.

• What is gained through registering?
There are a few features and articles that are only available to registered users.

• I want to help, how do I proceed?
Check the micropatronage page.

Creating content for this webpage takes a lot of time. Sometimes I need to do lame jobs in order to have some money, so if you contribute in some way I will be able to work more on creating content and other activities I consider beneficial. You can also offer me not-so-lame jobs, that would be good enough!

If you see merit in what I am already doing, you can use your credit card with this paypal button, or else you can deposit in Banrisul, Bank 041, agency 0100, cc 35.220185.0-6, CPF 766941270/49 in the name of Eduardo Pinheiro de Souza.

Otherwise you can buy me a book through my amazon wishlist, this would be truly nice, since I usually don't have any spare money for books.

This is a list of some of the projects and works you can help me with if you make a donation. If you want to indicate which task I should focus on — even if you are not making a donation —, please do so.

Translations to portuguese I have started
• Lion's Roar and Journey Without a Goal, by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
• Diamond Sutra
• Enlightened Journey, by Tulku Thondup (I actually need the book itself to continue on this one).

Writing
• Guirlanda de 108 Pontos, this is a small brochure with all the main points of dharma practice arranged sequencially and in lists with short explanations. Almost finished.
• Sem Budismo, an introduction to Buddhism, with an emphasis on the pratitya-samutpada (12 links of interdependent origination). It is getting very big, and will need a throughly revision.
• Quaint Scribble, a series of commentaries and inscrutable witticisms about death, language and "what needs to be done".
• Memórias do Neto de Dacum, o Aborígene, an old text that needs revision, carries a peculiar form of twisted sense of humor.
• Restos Mortais, non-egotrips, a biographical heartfelt collection of loose ends and unfinished snippets of text — needs a fast revision.

Internet
• Aleph (taken off-line for deep reformulation), a repository of literary and philosophical texts.
• Artha (to be done), a wiki-like dharma glossary with a semantic network.
• Yeshe Chölwa (taken off-line for deep reformulation), Crazy wisdom and other Buddhists texts.
• bodisatva.org, website connected with Lama Padma Samten that I would like to redo.

Eduardo Pinheiro is a dabbler on translation, buddhism, programming, design, poetry, philosophy, music and science (specially pop physics, mathematical and computational theory and psychology). He is a professional eater, sleeper and annoyer.

Born in São Paulo, 1975, Eduardo currently lives in Porto Alegre and is a philosophy undergrad at UFRGS. He now and then jobs as interpreter, translator, web designer and hardware technician.

He can be contacted regarding lecture and interview invitations, job and micropatronage offers, sugestions and questions about anything in this web site through email, skype or phone [+55(0xx)51] 9848.8269.

Tzal (tib. rtsal) is a tibetan word which means creativity, dynamic energy, skill. This is the personal website of Eduardo Pinheiro, not only a weblog, but a repository of all things textual related to his interests.

InterDP is a software Eduardo wrote in PHP, based on Cute News, a fast non-MySQL web publishing tool. Cute News was dramatically extended with functions such as automatic footnotes, a sophisticated tagging system and an automatic glossary. It is designed to make easy writing long, index and keyword organized text while directly publishing it on the web. But it is also well fit for little snippets of data such as links, reviews and aphorisms. So it can combine the trivial blog with sturdy, deep or more academic content.

Tzal.org concept involves the japanese aesthetic principle wabi-sabi mixed with geek-pop vintage sci-fi meets buddhist tantra computer nostalgia. The idea that no segment of the website will never be complete and the "shanty town" outlook to the programming itself, are mated with precise protocols, verborragy and diversity. The structure is more organic than mechanic in that the changes to the code are sometimes made with no structured planning whatsoever. The content itself follows the same idea of nostalgic but structured incompleteness. This evokes the ideas of worse is better and quick-and-dirty, as well as the paradigm of cowboy coding.

• Fuzzy discourse: in-jokes, cryptolects and sandhabhasa; peculiar and gregarious uses of language, informative ambiguity, "serious" double entendre proprieties; simultaneous complementary discourses, the yana idea; Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (weak) and how it relates to tantras and alchemic texts; essentially contested concepts; connections between allegory, metaphor, analogy and isomorphism; secrecy, obscurantism, obfuscation and cryptography; Wittgenstein's criticism on psychological interpretations; Sitz im Leben; jargon, kennings, esotericism, cult brainwashing through language, shibboleth, discourse communities, speech communities, newspeak; interdependency vs. apophenia, paranoiac-critical method.

• Game theory connections with aesthetics: musical improvisation, stand-up comedy and the Japanese art of flirtation; proteans, self-ridicule, self-irony, best response, hecklers, trembling hand perfect equilibrium, catharsis/epiphany and self-organized criticality; reason, emotion and body dexterity gestalt; irony, nonsense and deadpan: connections between ethics and aesthetics in humor. Jokes: exactness, synthesis, rhythm; punch line; albur; Verfremdungseffekt; vajra deadpan: seriousness, transcendence and humor.

• Wittgenstein and buddhism, the argument against private language and Prasangika Madhyamika; ahimsa, principle of charity and negation/affirmation as violence, parrhesia; debate (traditional debate rules in Tibetan Buddhism), ludic nature of debate and meaningful communication, language-game, metacommunicative competence; semantic externalism.

• Non-violent "protocols": paraconsistent logics and the possibility of valid information mining on contradictory systems: databases, Buddhist dialectics, game theory, software rot, software brittle, japanese aesthetics of incompleteness, self-organized criticality; hidden premises and ipsedixitism, koans, ambiguity tolerance, autism. Proprieties of dialog: glitches, hazards, mind kipple, protocol entropy, race condition, deadlocks, synchronization, no-win situations, satisficing, double bind, zugzwang, mamihlapinatapai, Bohm Dialogue, Occam's razor applied to protocols, dialogism, game semantics.

• Personal ontology (computer science) and mind mapping, computer aided brainstorming, expert systems, houses of cards vs. ikebana approaches to knowledge representation, deep blogging, public mind mapping; terminology extraction, folksonomy, dynamic taxonomy, semantic network, semantic relationships formalization; graphic modeling of mind maps using virtual physics; grok, flow, intelligence amplification and metacognition; infornography, consciousness of death and intellectual production.

• Anti-patterns: transposition of software engineering themes to philosophical methodology and writing in general.

• Japanese aesthetics of incompleteness and programming: featuritis, reinventing the wheel, quick-and-dirty, worse is better.

• Cybernetics, Crowd psychology, charisma, professional amateurs, the long tail, semantic web, "cybershamanism", viral marketing and meme design, buzzwords. Net anonymity, darknets, crypto-anarchism, dining cryptographers protocol, "cybermandala"; butterfly effect, decision theory, catastrophe theory, complexity theory and strategy; wikis, collective intelligence; haragei vs. pluralistic ignorance; Umwelt, Weltanschauung.

• Spiritual materialism, self-deception, doublethink, sophistry, cognitive dissonance, wishful thinking, magical thought, lying, point of no return, lie, indoctrination, propaganda, big lie, brainwashing, groupthink, illusion of control, clustering illusion, pareidolia, apophenia; political correctness, psychobabble, technobabble.

• The lifes of the 84 Mahasiddhas, yeshe chölwa, idiossincratic spiritual teachers; personality, individuality and Buddhism; daimon, genius.

• Philosophy of mind, definition of consciousness, possibility of artificial consciousness; connections with the incompleteness theorem, externalism, problem of other minds; self-reference; sentience, qualia, hard problem of consciousness; arguments against epiphenomenalism, emergentism and anomalous monism; artificial intelligence (weak and strong), pattern recognition, machine learning, symbol grounding, cognitive architecture; embodied philosophy; artificial consciousness rights, animal rights, bioethics; mind and suffering, first person science, meditation, rigpa.

• Concepts of property and intellectual property; Buddhism and property, anti-copyright, infoanarchism, micropatronage; "Property is theft!" Essentialism and property, differences between possession and property, the problem of originality; arguments against self-ownership; allemansrätten; inalienable right of copy.

• Greco-buddhism, mutual influences between Greek and Buddhist civilizations. Interpretatio graeca, cultural imperialism, syncretism. Transition from sudhamma to mahayana.

• Elite theory, Iron Law of Oligarchy, hacker culture, conspiracy theory, radical transparency, direct democracy, e-democracy, inclusive democracy; anti-corporate activism, anti-consumerism, corporate personhood; direct action, Walden, simple living, frugality, freeganism, civil disobedience, conscientious objector, deep ecology; friendship, style, personal boycott to smokers and those who indulge in other similarly barbaric habits.

• Mandala, Indra's net, autopoiesis, system theory, Avatamsaka Sutra, ikebana, fractals, complexity, diamond-like mind, recursion, strange loops, self-similarity, symmetry, endless knot, coemergence, subject-object problem.