Monday, November 14, 2011

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 )

Friday, November 04, 2011

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

Tuesday, November 01, 2011

flash of farsight

the reality of the universe is the skin of a dragon