| Decline |
[15 Jul 2011|08:54am] |
Christian says: "If you want to understand Russia, imagine the Khanate riding into every town, taking the thirty most beautiful women and killing the thirty most able men -- every few years for a hundred years. Everything after that makes a bit more sense."
The Russians have run LJ into the ground -- I have no further use for it. Future writing will be done here.
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| Glasgow Kiss (Male'ah ha'aretz kinyanecha) |
[28 Apr 2011|10:13pm] |
"It's like love! Only it hurts more."
"I disagree."
"What, that it's like love?"
". . . no. Nevermind."
I don't know why I said that, but I suspected then, and know now, who really heard it.
* * * * *
"The people you think will help you, won't; the people you don't expect, will. . . . If you can't, then you must; if you must, then you can."
Himy was not wrong about either of these things.
There is at least one thing to be gained by having someone not be there for you when you need them most: Taleb calls it "convexity to disturbance". More colloquially it's sometimes called courage.
* * * * *
I still think of myself as weak, undisciplined, unskilled -- most of the time. Then I pull my head up and look around at everyone else, including my former selves, and extrapolate five years ahead. And smile. I'm doing pretty alright. Head back down, keep humping along.
Against my expectations and intentions, it's shaping up to be a magical year.
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| Poetry Corner (A Taste of Things to Come) |
[06 Apr 2011|09:40pm] |
I start my city with a brick (one brick)
Then add another brick (two bricks)
Brick by brick, I manufacture homes for fallen angels
I ain't no great Samaritan, that's just the way the game goes
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| Department of things you'd know if you paid attention in high school chem |
[16 Mar 2011|11:09am] |
. . . and little things that make me sigh: people who will acknowledge that frying with vegetable oil is unhealthy and yet think that polyunsaturated fats are good for you in low-temperature cooking. Increasing ambient temperature is just one way to facilitate (lipid) oxidation; lowering ambient pH is another. What do you think is happening when you bathe vegetable oil in hydrochloric acid? Durr.
This is why you must care about science. We're not talking topological field theory or even quantum chemistry here. Just knowing the basics of a lot of fields and integrating them into your day to day thinking is like having the magical superpower to see right and wrong where other people see a haze of maybe and sorta and perhaps and itsallsocomplicated.
(NB: I make vinaigrette with olive oil like any other gourmand. Some things are just worth it.)
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| Model Error |
[16 Mar 2011|10:54am] |
"The mean value of acute fatality risk by radiation exposure resultant from an accident of a nuclear installation to individuals of the public, who live in the vicinity of the site boundary of the nuclear installation, should not exceed the probability of about 1x10^6 per year."
That's the Japanese Nuclear Commission in 2003, via Nassim.
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| Better (I): Atemporal Living |
[02 Feb 2011|12:55pm] |
I've experimented a bit with what makes me more effective at getting stuff done while staying sane, with more failures than successes. Here is one thing that works for me: schedule as little as possible. At first it seems like a terrible idea because in lieu of a clear agenda you tend to just do the first thing that grabs your attention, and can end up merely faffing around a lot with tasks that don't add up to anything. But this is a symptom, not the disease: it made me notice just how much scheduling atrophies your phronesis by offloading the burden of making decisions now to an idealistic plan made back then. It makes you face your akrasia squarely.
If you then put the work in to get lucid on what your true priorities are (which requires a high degree of internal honesty), you start learning to judge at any given moment what's most important (and to tell this apart from what merely seems urgent). Once you learn to recognize automatically whether you're falling off-point or not, the distractions gradually become less distracting. You incrementally gain integrity, your actions become more purposeful. The skill that makes this work is self-monitoring. The major trap to avoid is falling into a guilt spiral. (I'm making these things sound easier than they are.)
I find it also encourages me toward faster, tighter OODA loops: if something comes to my attention which seems important, I see if I can do it right now. If not, I dump it into a "later" pile with no particular time pressures associated, which I mine through when I need to decide what to do next. Often a lot of it looks unimportant at second glance, and ends getting chucked to /dev/null. Only if I absolutely must do I assign something a specific spatiotemporal location, i.e. if I need to coordinate with someone else; schedules are something one makes for other people, not oneself.
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| Shedding Error |
[25 Jan 2011|11:45am] |
Difficult admissions:
* I find it easier to be uncomfortable than to be comfortable. That is not to say I enjoy it more; merely to say that suffering comes a little too naturally to me. This needs to change, not merely for my sake but for that of those I'm close with.
* I can't labor any longer under the delusion that I don't care what people think if they're not kin. For better or worse I'm exquisitely sensitive to expectations, and I may as well own that trait and start leveraging it by taking an active role in making people expect me to be the kind of person I need to be.
* Small really is beautiful. I get more enduring psychological benefits from having accomplished something concrete and imperfect than chasing after the perfect abstraction. Something is always going to be wrong; just keep fucking going.
* The point of having money is so you don't need to think about money, and it really is okay to sell your art. Fear of losing integrity is for people who don't know where their core really is. Howard Roark was a piker.
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| Quote of the Day |
[04 Jan 2011|12:29pm] |
"... the whole system is a fine case of the proverbial self-licking ice-cream cone, not to mention a substantial source of distraction, or as we naively call it 'employment' ... this is after all one of the main purposes of the university system: to employ extremely intelligent people, who might otherwise be out causing trouble, in tasks that consume their spare brainpower."
-- the Bug
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| The Candle |
[09 Nov 2010|11:53am] |
Flame
My love is like a sun for you,
To warm you, melt you, let you free:
It lights on every one for you
And what it melts returns to me.
Wax
My love is like a fuel to you,
You burn me up to fire your sun:
I only could be cruel to you
To stop the way my love would run.
Wick
I am the thread that comes between,
To bind you and to let you part:
What could be, is, and might have been
I am the cord that cleft your heart.
-- James Keys
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| What is the sound of one bit flipping? |
[30 Jun 2010|02:40pm] |
". . . a logical machine following definite rules may never come to a conclusion. It may go on grinding through different stages without ever coming to a stop, either by describing a pattern of activity of continually increasing complexity, or by going into a repetitive process like the end of a chess game in which there is a continuing cycle of perpetual check. This occurs in the case of some of the paradoxes of Cantor and Russell. Let us consider the class of all classes which are not members of themselves. Is this class a member of itself? If it is, it is certainly not a member of itself; and if it is not, it is equally certainly a member of itself. A machine to answer this question would give the successive temporary answers: 'yes,' 'no,' 'yes,' 'no,' and so on, and would never come to equilibrium."
-- Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics (p. 126)
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| A Tale of Two Back Massages |
[29 Jun 2010|03:05am] |
. . . or rather, the reactions of the dudes administering them.
About a year ago: "Oh wow dude, you're *really* tense."
A few days ago: "Man, you're like the loosest, most relaxed guy ever."
This would seem to validate a lot of decisions made in the interim.
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| "As long as we think, act, live via an object, or as an object: that is bondage." |
[23 Jun 2010|09:35pm] |
Indra half-joked the other day that if we were constrained to speak only truth, nobody would say anything at all. Inaccurate like most humor, but one gets the point.
Being liberated is about giving things up. Among the more precious of these things are the stories we tell about who we are, which serve vanity at the cost of obscuring the reality that there isn't, and never could be, anyone at all behind them. Chatter only muddles.
There will be writing here again, but there won't be an author -- other than perhaps as a literary device.
* * * * *
The book is dead; long live the book. Having a grand project to work on after dropping out of university was like weaning a heroin junkie using methadone -- it sated a need for narrative. Having done enough research and thinking to realize the enormity of the task, and having subsequently habituated to "doing nothing" (in the daoistic sense), the thing has been thoroughly reconceptualized into a years-long project, and most of the pre-existing work destroyed on grounds of simply being wrongheaded.
No longer feeling the need to qualify one's existence has a remarkable clarifying effect on one's attitude toward work -- and mental health more broadly. For the first time since adolescence, I don't feel neurotic.
* * * * *
This extended holiday in the bardo ends in two and a half months. Then it's back to school -- a different kind than before. Working out a curriculum now, and looking for tutors and mentors. Learning, say, quantum field theory without help may be doable, but probably isn't the best way. It's something of a relief to be able to acknowledge that. Also to acknowledge that trying to do everything at once is a recipe for doing nothing at all.
Y'all will know how it goes.
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| On Purpose |
[04 May 2010|11:34am] |
Since January I've been in the most perfect romantic relationship of my life. My days are spent doing whatever I want; in the evenings I get paid to cook and goof around. I've been connecting more with the people around me that lift me up and disconnecting from people that pull me down. I'm happy.
And now I'm moving away.
I've already done the logistics and I know this makes sense. But I can't help laughing a little at the irony, knowing fully that my capacity to walk away from comfort and into the unknown is what's brought joy to my life, again and again.
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| Quote of the Day |
[25 Mar 2010|12:20pm] |
". . . unless the organism can feel pain, it cannot withdraw from danger, so that the unwillingness to be able to be hurt is in fact suicidal, whereas the simple retreat from an occasion of pain is not."
-- Alan Watts, Nature, Man and Woman (p. 89)
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| Click |
[23 Mar 2010|02:20pm] |
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I just realized that for the first time in a long time, there are no major pressures or obligations in my life. I can't describe how liberating this feels.
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| Poetry Corner |
[16 Mar 2010|02:10pm] |
Speak to her heart!
That manic force
When wits depart
Forbids remorse.
Dream with her dreaming
Until her lust
Seems to her seeming
An act of trust!
Do without doing!
Love's wilful potion
Veils the ensuing,
And brief, commotion.
-- J.V. Cunningham, "Ars Amoris"
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| Quote of the Day |
[05 Mar 2010|12:36pm] |
"Those who make the mistake of thinking in terms of a first cause are fated never to become men of science. . . . We shall never succeed in changing our age of iron into an age of gold until we give up our ambition to find a single cause for all our ills, and admit the existence of many causes acting simultaneously, of intricate correlations and reduplicated actions and reactions."
-- Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means (p. 14-15)
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| Nice |
[04 Mar 2010|09:18am] |
"In general insulin will promote anabolic processes of a cell while causing a reduction in catabolic processes."
That's the best single-sentence description of insulin I've ever seen, from John T. Hancock's Cell Signaling (p. 246, 2nd ed.), an otherwise disappointingly unhelpful text.
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| Prosopagnosia Genetics |
[01 Mar 2010|06:15pm] |
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A while back I wrote up a fun article about how impaired facial recognition is more common than you might expect. Turns out facial recognition is highly heritable, i.e. there's considerable genetic variance contributing to face-recognizing ability. This gels with my guess that selection pressures for it have been comparatively recent -- if it was ancient you'd see a lot less genetic variation, since selection would have pulled the relevant alleles to ubiquity. Not too surprising, but cool. I get a kick out of stuff that feeds my hunch that there's a lot of hidden variance in human perceptions . . .
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