phaedrus caught the ghost of rationality ,and thrashed it good.
intuition. 

quotes , wittgenstein

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.


source : Brainyquote.com

jason fried says (video on ted.com) that work doesn't happen at work. work ,like sleep, happens in a progression of stages. if the progression gets interrupted, you have to 'take it from the top'. of course, you can't start an eight hour sleep session if you get interrupted at 12 ... or can you ? i may not be sleep deprived, i certainly am work deprived.

simon singh has a video on the power of mental frames that i watched and liked very much. for bonus points, - it features led zeppelin's stairway to heaven.

susan blackmore says we need meditation to weed out memes that accumulate in our brain.
i'm also totally behind her answer ot the Edge question -
Q. What will change everything?
A. Artificial, self replicating meme machines.
exactly, why must one do all the work ? it is tasteful to let loose a subtle monster and let the rest of the world program itself to obscurity, or harmony, or bubblegum radio shoes or whatever...

in a book, she claims that Buddha, during his meditations, arrived at what is today known as Bundle theory. Bundle theory deals with objecthood and was developed by Hume.
(Kant Descartes Hume ? No, but he certainly can whistle)
reminded me of something i read (at www.defmacro.org titled taming-doubt.html) in which slava says :
"The second and final blow came after I took up meditation and observed that the ideas simply enter and leave my mind and none of them are truly "mine"."
(taming doubt, taming perfection, the reality of enso - all three are great reads)
so,the bundle means there is no real self. in other words, vast emptiness.

adding a reference to sir ken robinson - schools kill creativity and the video in which he tells the story of the catz person (Gillian Lynne, i think)

mandatory mention - division of labour considered evil.
the wheel-and-spoke arrangement is great as a device to model behaviour in d-o-l societies -
ideally each spoke is one division and it channels its output through the hub to the rest. in good cases , the hub is empty. when the system is gamed, the hub gets piled high with goodies that are stopepd from passing through.
apparently , nature abhors the even distribution and works to concentrate 80 into 20 - (bible, barabasi-scale-free networks, winner-take all, iron law of distribution, alvin toffler in the third wave - decoding the second wave - the rise of the integrators )

Daniel Wolpert says brains are needed only ONLY to move.
very nice ted video
and brains are bayesian inference engines.

flash of farsight

the reality of the universe is the skin of a dragon

intelligent agents , upon encountering anomalies, quickly move to negate/compromise/compensate the anomaly.
sometimes this translates to the 'i gotta tell someone about this'.
when everybody knows, the anomaly is a commonly known thing and hence no more anomalous.
that's why media works hard to de-sensitize the population so that they don't find immoral,cruel, corrupt behaviour as anomalous.

Every positive change--every jump to a higher level of energy and awareness--involves a rite of passage. Each time to ascend to a higher rung on the ladder of personal evolution, we must go through a period of discomfort, of initiation. I have never found an exception.
- Dan Millman

same guy who said 'paradox,humor, change'

today's haul


[link][excerpts]
What he will not say, since he assumes a Westerner cannot comprehend it, is that through these seeming physical privations he finds shelter for the inner man.
...
..
..
Perhaps most important of all, we in the West are finally taking to heart what the Japanese Zen monks knew in medieval times: that domestic architecture and interiors can and should fulfill a requirement in our lives that is ordinarily served by art.

-- especially that part about rooms not being human without human presence and rooms being human only with a human inside it

suggested reading - Zen culture by Thomas Hoover

essays in idleness , kenko

* the art of tao of zen of war of motorcycle maintenance *

if you will you won't
if you don't, you may
still the butterfly flutters by

i wonder if there are peanut butterflies
------------------------------
good gas, i think ?
------------------------
What does "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." mean to you? (self.philosophy)
I was reading Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche and came across the famous quote, what are your
thoughts?
----------------------
Ross Ashby's Law of requisite variety.
If you fight a monster you have to 'know' the monster ,and that means knowing it's attributes and behaviour,
once you internalize such behaviour (say, being unfair, or killing someone after you promised to spare them- typical to monsters ), these behaviours lie in the arsenal of your subconscious, and thereby you run the risk of blurring the boundary between 'your' behaviours and 'monster' behaviours .
just as if you put 'your money' and 'your friend's money' in your pocket, you run the risk of dipping your hand into your pocket and using your friend's money even though he only gave it to you so that you may bring back a watermelon for him ....
the same way, if you deal with murderers and rapists for years, your brain runs the idea that 'humans are to be abused' whenever dealing with them, and at some time, without thinking, this idea might leak into your action too...

------------------
chore wars is a great idea. we need more of these , instead of hollow checkins

there is no joy or sorrow, only varying dopamine levels

neal stephenson - white-collar-ising blue-collar-istics

for gumption and recharge, see Illuminated Thread

fear and greed are the twin engines that drive masses of humanity
if necessity is the mother of invention, laziness must be it's father, or atleast the milkman, or a travelling salesman ...


plants are the only guys who manage to live OFF the land - i mean, on JUST water and CO2 !!
that's a super-power, seriously !!

rediscovering Kathy Sierra's lectures. It began with a talk titled 'how to kick ass' on itconversations.com, cooupled with a blog post on moserware.com titled 'how to become a grandmaster' - both touched on similiar themes and had good information ,the second one more technically so, but h2ka stayed on in the mind because, well , I really care about kicking ass.
That was and is Kathy's argument - talk to the brain, not the mind - http://i.imgur.com/3iZ0k.png (in case the link doesnt work, this is a side by side comparison of brain sizes - fish/amphibian/reptile/mammal (ps: does a fish have NO VOLUNTARY actions at all ?)) - this picture might help - the large brain thinggy you see is the mammalian brain - the neocortex is a small peanut sitting on top of this. the neocortex is reponsible for 'logic' and 'reason', but the LARGE mammalian brain is responsible for keeping you clicking away on reddit.
Agreed, the we need to submit to the peanut one day, but the big one is what will drive us there, nor not at all.

recently watched a video on youtube - kathy sierra - keynote - 2009 nmc conference. Pretty impressive. then later realized her material is all there on her blog - headrush.typepad.com

reddit paid off with this link today -
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kin8p/iama_person_who_beat_my_depression_by_moving_7000/
while you notice this is in the pattern of campbell's 'hero's journey', the 'hero's journey' is probably not so exotic -we see it in everyday events ...
this passage from the link proved very very enlightening -
==
[–]DDme 19 points20 points21 points 13 hours ago

Honestly, people like to get all psychologist on you about this and say "oh but it'll come back yaddayadda."

We need to acknowledge that we have evolved inside a more intense lifestyle. We were made for tribalism, competition, interaction, challenge, and a life span of up to 40 years. Our chemical biology isn't going to be all that content with 12 hours of reddit every day and menial office work. We have to deal with irrelevant crap inside fractured and unsteady social groups, where our peers are seemingly everybody and nobody.

Clinical depression isn't such a clear thing. Some people spiral into depression just because things are too easy, and they need more challenge and purpose, they may not realise it yet; but for gods sake this doesn't call for medication. Depression to me is waking up in the morning and staring into space, everything I want to fight for is removed from my reach, I have no legitimate identity and no feeling of authenticity. 20 press-ups later and hey presto I am back, it's time for action.

I think you will be fine if you keep your future full of challenges and people who are positive about you, and above all, people that you respect.

==
note - ".. a more intense lifestyle. We were made for tribalism, competition, interaction, challenge, a .. "

http://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20Society
this guy talks about how and why we fragment into subcultures in order to find meaning..

fight club keeps talking about how the current generation american's greatest depression is their lives -
yep , it all makes sense

from 'art of manliness'

“Recovering the self must, as a sine qua non, include the recovery of the ability to have and to cognize these inner signals, to know what and whom one likes and dislikes, what is enjoyable and what is not, when to eat and when not to, when to sleep, when to urinate, when to rest. The experientially empty person, lacking these directive from within, these voices of the real self, must turn to outer cues for guidance, for instance eating when the clock tells him to, rather than obeying his appetite…He guides himself by clocks, rules, calendars, schedules, agendas, and by hints and cues from other people.”
- Maslow

also, shining your shoes is a kind of meditation, they say


==
purposeless on purpose, the paradoxical way to win

==
a lot of life's neuroses arise from putting analysis of the event before the event has happened
==
reading asimov's Foundation. it's not so much science fiction as political history ...

surfing alone
this too
robot nation
double morton - stupidity

megadeth has a song about the disintegrators. It goes something like "The slayer's arrived On a black horse of steel Trouble is coming Hell on two wheels Hide in... " bla bla bla
and all that. However, it's the integrators we should've been worried about . If only someone'd listen to toffler.

“Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”

you should've told me earlier !!!

hoo fuchin ha

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8m7lFQ3njk

this is blowing my mind. soothing. pieces falling into place.
chunks. same as primordial thoughts.thinking with both is similiar.
//atoms ,primitives - same as defun defined operators. ha !
whee !!

'please' is a category. category doesn't need to be visual things like 'shoe' or 'car'.

reset

in Microserfs, Karla advocates the theory that muscles holds the body's memories, and hence massage releases them etc etc.
I agree. I'm thinking a slow warm-up followed by stretching of muscles - section by section - accompanied by and in rhythm with breathing makes brain re-aware of the whole body. I f you sit all day, the brain forgets that the body has all these muscle-bone-nerve systems...

i did this. and this too.

this is effin spot on !!!
http://tomu.imgur.com/graffiti__streetart

for i in `find . -name *.java | xargs wc -l | awk '{ print $1 }' `; do echo ===============; a=`expr $a + $i`; echo $a; done


map( lambda x : x[:-len('.xml')].lower().replace('-','_')+'_ITCase.java' ,[x.strip() for x in os.listdir('.') if x[-len('.xml'):] == '.xml' and not x == ''])


the first one's just so so. gives kloc
the second one's simple, if you format it out.

is the same as

[ j[:-len('.xml')].lower().replace('-','_')+'_ITCase.java' for j in [x.strip() for x in os.listdir('.') if x[-len('.xml'):] == '.xml' and not x == '']]

limits

there's only so long you can sit idle while your operating systems hides your work from you - click here - no you didn't click properly, now click again, i know you minimised everything, we're not going to let you un-minimise things again - click each icon once, again now. ...


death to you ,mac

they said

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
- Rudyard Kipling , in "If"

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson , "Self Reliance"

Ignore everybody - Hugh MacLeod

adventure

I remember when books used to be about adventure. Tintin goes to Tibet, the Famous Five go to Kirrin Island, the Hardy Boys go off to some mountain where they get knocked out cold by the regulation henchman, even Nancy Drew would find some haunted mansion to wander round and get locked up in... going back even further , the Rat and the Mole would go on picnics ,boating on the river, with baskets of food, and so did the three men and their dog.
Alice dropped into a magical world one boring afternoon and Rudolph Rassendyl switched places with the king of a distant land.
From the other side, there's the island where the ships built by children end up, with the ship museum on Vetrogorsk, and the magic carpet, and kvass at Arbat street...
Then there was Robinson Crusoe , and the three on Coral Island , and the Swiss family Robinson, and then there was Jim Hawkins on the Hispaniola.

Seriously, what happened ....

I read Cryptonomicon at a time when I was trapped into a socio-economic-cultural phenomenon which was drinking out my soul in great gulps. Wavelength is such an important and undocumented word..

they said

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone

this and more here

heart trust

trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
- Goethe

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Alan Watts has a whole series devoted to 'getting you out of your mind'

the reptile

what do you call the urges to eat,kill and mate ? do you call them primitive urges ?
what happens when you suppress them ?

readme !! take a hike, not a pill

hey Ken !! loooong time !! have you figured out R.E.M yet ? : P

Arthur Koestler

I came across Roots of coincidence in Alan Moore's V for Vendetta.
I looked up Lotus and the Robot and wangled a second hand copy from Amazon.
Great book.

For we live in a state of cultural osmosis....has become irresistible. What makes it irresistible are the new media of mass communication ;and what makes the emerging pattern so vulgar is the emergence of the under privileged classes with their undeveloped tastes as consumers of mass culture.The result is that inevitable levelling-down of standards to the lowest common denominator which accompanied every revolution in the past. The liquidation of slums entails a period of cultural slumming ,though only transitory one hopes.

i did this a long time ago

a path-finding algo (a* implementation) finding, well, paths in a grid.
on openprocessing.org
needs java.

cool readings to change your life

this
cracked : seven things you are doing wrong
and this
cracked : weird things that influencebad behaviour
and this

cal newport : corrupted callings

now go turn your life around ( or 90deg, as your story be)

gibson

walking around brigade road re-affirms gibson

to return to the source

to connect to True Emptiness
court boredom, and have it sit on your shoulder
like an unsuspecting butterfly

enlightenment

from the onion

title

you do not build a palace by building a hundred different rooms in hundred different places.

i made this

hello world. iam here. sitting in this box

connections

1)
Probably no one would ever know this; it did not matter. In the 1980s, Minsky and Good had shown how neural networks could be generated automatically—self replicated—in accordance with any arbitrary learning program. Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of a human brain. In any given case, the precise details would never be known, and even if they were, they would be millions of times too complex for human understanding.

—Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey[8]

2)
Rick Hanson says you can change your mind to change your brain which in turn can change your mind.
" ... when your mind changes, your brain changes -- both temporarily, with the momentary flicker of synaptic activity, and in lasting ways through formation of new neural structures. Therefore, you can use your mind to change your brain to benefit your whole being -- and every other being whose life you touch."

Control over consciousness

Control of consciousness determines quality of life.
from Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

"The last great attempt to free consciousness from the domination of impulses and social controls was psychoanalysis; as Freud pointed out , the two tyrants that fought for control over the mind were the id and the superego , the first a servant of the genes, the second a lackey of society, both representing the "Other". Opposed to them was the ego, which stood for the geniuine needs of the self connected to its concrete environment."

- a middle path ?!? could it be ... !!??!!


"... the intended result is identical: to free inner life from the threat of chaos, on the one hand, and from rigid conditioning of biological urges on the other, and hence to become independent from the social controls that exploit both"

a-ha !
remember - games people play - spontaneity ?

"Control over consciousness cannot be instituitonalized. As soon as it becomes part of a set of social rules and norms, it ceases to be effective in the way it was originally intended to be. Routinization, unfortunately, takes place very rapidly.Freud was still alive when his quest for liberating the ego from its oppressors was turned into a staid ideology and rigidly regulated profession"

cross-reference:
1. DeLanda /Erik Davis interview - stratification and destratification
[internally c/r deleuze&guattari]
2. Tao Te Ching - the tao that can be told is not the eternal tao
[because the tao that can be told gets institutionalized]
3. Zen - a transmission beyond scriptures
4. Buddha - decay is inherent in all compounded things. strive unceasingly
This makes more sense. It frames 'Against History,Against Leviathan' in a clearer light too.

one more piece :
"If one has failed to develop curiosity and interest in the early years, it is a good idea to acquire them now, before it is too late to improve the quality of life.
To do so is fairly easy in principle, but more difficult in practice. Yet it is sure worth trying. The first step is to develop the habit of doing whatever needs to be done with concentrated attention, with skill rather than inertia. Even the most routine tasks, like washing dishes, dressing, or mowing the lawn become more rewarding if we approach them with the care it would take to make a work of art."

cr alan watts work as play

digest 4-1-11

In the news today, mattmaroon feels that google will become an AI company. He goes on to list his (day)dreams and frankly, I like them.
Mainly , driverless cars - we already have those , but not yet in a large institutionalised way. This means lots of time for yourself, distance doesn't matter as automated cars can go fast coz every other car on the road has a robot driver which follows the rules. you can get your kids cars because they are not driving, you can get drunk all the time because your car's like a taxi now.... nice. Something like this needs a giant amount of influence - it's not just money, you need laws to work for you. This should keep the auto lobby busy.

Duckduckgo has a site up explaining how your sexual problems and financial woes, as entered in the google search box become visible to people who you want to hide them from. Also, a tall lanky google engineer used search data to snoop on four minors whom he met. Differently, another google engineer got a teenager out of jail. The kid was arrested for filming a cop beating up a teen.
An interesting link that showed up is this : a test that can spot a single stray cancer cell in a BILLION may be available at your doctor's soon. It's from J&J. This test does 'liquid' biopsy and might do away with the long needle one. (Will HouseMD lose its charm if House's pawns aren't forced to poke patients with long long needles, sometimes twice in the same episode ... I'm thinking they'll move on to full limb amputations next to keep up the wtf )

Also, Thomas Kuhn did something important in his 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'. People say it affects how you/we think.

The zenhabits guy lists the top 2 habits of creatives - 1. constructive solitude 2. participation(?)

George Orwell calls Indian tea as 'feels wiser braver and more optimistic after drinking it'
read more here

Things we laugh at:
1. misplacement : a zebra in a doctor's coat
2. schadenfraude : bad things that happen to others and that we feel won't happen to us
3. absurdity,stretching of reality beyond bounds : superset of misplacement


More as the lone reporter in our office surfs at work.

on music

i think listening to moby naturally progresses to massive attack .