moving past java

- >Thursday is a dull day. Need larger doses of caffeine, the Chai Point machine won't cut it.
this has been a long time coming. Even before Strand, I was harping on this, while some successful people have built successful lives without knowing Java, I am unable to get off this island.
With Java getting slightly better every year, it also makes it easier to stay, though whether this is the equivalent of peeing in your pants to stay warm, we won't know till the freeze sets in.

In other languages, I assumed I would be able to get off the ground quicker with ideas, but my experiences with Flask didn't happen.
I still believe if I do this in a non-java only company, I might actually see the benefits, the problem here being the brain split between the Java world and office world and the python world.

When moving on, it must be to a language that is not bollocks, but also makes it possible to have a great career. The end of this exercise (and related 6_6 ) must be freedom from worrying about a job ever.


Was reading DHH on SvN   . Felt so reaffirmed. My 32s are coming back to me.
Led to Jason Fried's talk on Chase-Jarvis-show . Listened while driving to work from Sankar Eye.
Slack (and related real-time chat applications) have turned Work from creative to an assembly line, where you can't miss the part coming down the conveyor. Forget Knights, Castles , forts and mills -    you are in a Charlie Chaplin movie - the one where he gets a nervous breakdown on the line and squirts everybody with an oil gun. This is a very interesting take on the economic clutches we are in.

I'm guessing I could master a language in a month or two, if completely immersed, however the last time I tried something partially close to this - the clojure-dopewars-android days, it was traumatic at the end. Working in android means perpetually being on Stackoverflow, and I didn't have that, or 'finished app' as my goal - I was thinking of something on the lines of Processing ,or the joy people claim to get when working with Lisp. Lisp is recommended for large organisms, and Pascal (and Java) for large pyramids of crafted stone. Given this feature of Lisp , Clojure is not Lisp, though it is the closest. Difference between Java and other languages is that Java programs manipulate large chunks of Java code, whereas other languages, say Python, C-L or Ruby manipulate data.

While some startups continue to slug along in Ruby, funded ones take a long time and get rewritten in Java.  V2.0 , or even patches on V1.x are a pain. We want to do v0.001, which rakes in users and moolah.

If you are moving out of Java, then you should know the replacement in depth, doing both algorithms and real world projects in it. Have you considered Goodrich/Tamassia's python algos ?

Also interviews now look at real world application of skills. Java projects don't get into the real world fast enough to do the many that needs to be done. So you should be using a language that lets you get into production for _ALL_ your ideas , including and especially your useless ones (See simone giertz ted talk !!  + _why , I swear I'm upto no good!), and get them out asap ! Ultimately, this and the next para are the 2 boundaries of the trade, charging money being one more , which we will come to one other day.

EPI : You could start the day cerebrally by memorizing CS stuff - there is so much - algorithms, java classes & the JVM,  workings of OS and networks, assembly ... If nothing this will keep you sharp and you'll be able to talk.

Systems are for solving problems. Knowing system limitations has nothing to do with Java usually-  knowing software helps here. Algorithms, computer structure, operating systems - these will never go out of fashion.


NoSQL , in depth redis, how does mongo do stuff, how does a mysql cluster operate , what is off heap memory, which product provides this , what is CPU cache and memory ?


Here's a word on doctrine, always go to the edge where skill & ability to do things is needed. Established fatty layers can afford to toy with candidates in a way that leads to negative conditioning, and can be best avoided.

True big-data / distributed systems experience is vital and cannot be book-made. If that's what is attracting potential employers , then false pretenses might backfire.

Comic relief : Stackoverflow snippet I came across

-> aaaand we are onto the next Thursday. For some reason I am more rested today.
 Learning a new language & framework, say Ruby/Rails , needs immersion, which needs time. It cannot be done over evenings, when you have to come back in the morning and reload java into your head. If I get a break ,first thing to do is immerse in python or ruby or go or Scala or whatever for long enough to emerge on the other side as a <X>Warrior.

If you have a chance to write integration tests  for a Java/Spring project , in another language, which one would you choose ? I can think of JRuby, Jython and Clojure to begin with., in increasing order of appeal.



Today is a coffee day ; Unlike last week, when it was Thursday, it's a Friday this week. It might have to do with the one round of 5bx I did yesterday morning. Going past my limit puts me in a energy-surge, and corresponding appetite surge.

Sizov makes good reading (link from Partha) - 1. promotions are a trap - you tend to stay longer to accumulate them until you become obsolete, 2. don't learn frameworks,  learn patterns,  3. you are not a software developer, but a money maker ...
As per this, language is irrelevant to the larger picture - the tech scene will fill in some language /framework. Then, while it follows it is better to work in a language you can reason about and distill ideas to working code faster  - hence ruby/python etc, if you can deliver faster in Java, then Java remains a valid choice.
But after beating my head around the opaque layers of Java misdirected by Berlin, I am convinced that Java is a trap.....

To know real constraints of the system, code has to be written in C and you should see it fail, with messages from the metal underneath. With Java, you only get a check-engine light.

Feb 1 today. It's the next Friday. It's been a while now. My unit of consciousness is a week !
I have been fiddling with Java coding interview problems, and have implemented a one-time pad implementation using java.util.Random . It doesn't work so well ( unicode support ?).
I wonder how long the python version will take to code up. I also ran into a python script which pulls data from urls, and read Swaroop Ch's " A Byte of Python" and created a _gasp_ object !!
You can go through life's obstacles, but never around them.  All my trains are stopped at their individual Mt. Fuji.  Also researched some non-painful web frameworks for Python. Back to Django for portability and cachet.Most of them are crufty. Go with the universally accepted cruft.
Java or Java's sake, projects and pieces in Python. Learn OOPS, Django and the complexity.
Chassis in Java, Systems in Java, data in Py wherever whenever possible.
List of Java things - Java performance tuning, garbage collection, system tools like jmap,jps etc, JLS, JVMspec, venners inside Java, concurrent classes, nio, classloaders etc.
BF, stock-flow system , game engine with ticks and world updates, stocks, nutrition etc - all Py.

Areas PPTs.  - Like the Chassis diagram which gave so much joy, I should make PPTs of ecosystems and solutions. They will act as maps for learnings

one of these I have not read ...

dems ma peeps

 Feynman's missing

reading list 2019

so good - cal newport
power -pfeffer
microeconomics - varian
12 rules
maps of meaning

portable mba
[ ,finance * accounting, marketing, investing, economics, strategy, pm, enterpreneurship]


homo deus

linux - wrox
think like a freak
how not to be wrong power of mathematical thinking

microhabits - solve small problems this 2019

In 2019 it's important to remember a few things -

a) Not having perspective is the default. So it's important to reverse that, and work diligently on the plan, until it becomes second nature.

b) It's vital to have personal metrics for progress. It's hard to overestimate how un-clued in others are, especially the ones closest to you

c) It is not possible to get things done without an environment conducive to cerebral work. There is no way you can work in a noisy place, or when tired  & sleepy. Hack this . Which brings us to

d) A pre-requisite of c. is diet,  exercise, socializing, rest & recreation. Without mental and physical wellbeing, nothing can grow.

e) finish things. You need to leave behind you a lot of pieces of completed work, which will be the bricks of your life.

Appendix : Plan
i)  meditation - stillness, breath, flinch-less -that's all. Sit still, mind still, control the reaction impulse.

ii)  write project logs in one place. Review them  when quiet, & relaxed . So that cold cognition wins.

Susan Blackmore and Jordan Peterson

Came across a youtube video featuring a talk show  featuring Jordan Peterson vs Susan Blackmore, and I strictly feel the 'vs' is superfluous here, because both these people are scientific, and rational.

It's as surprisingly rare combination these days, and when you throw in well-spoken, it's amazing.  Going by the thumb rule -, whenever you see something new, it means the wave has tipped , and that many others will be seeing too. So I expect a new wave of rational, scientific and well-spoken literary people dominating the zeitgeist soon.

Jordan Peterson is the second person whole intellectual work strikes me as very true and apt, who is religious. The first was McLuhan, whose every sentence rings so true that even after I read any of his quotes on wikiquote, I'm left with a feeling that I'm not doing enough to propagate his words . And he was a devout Catholic. Jim Rohn referred to his  2 hr seminar as 'fundamentals, because the ideas stem from the Bible'.   Kevin Kelly also recommends the same. Jordan Peterson calls the Bible to have 'narrative truth'.  Merton's Chuang Tzu is also very accessible, and the quotes on fasting were very hard-hitting for me.  However, I fear  he finds Christianity in Taoism and Zen,  rather than finding just Taoism and Zen.

Should we aim to be the stinktree of Chuang Tzu ? Ajahn Brahm ,in his many talks that have accompanied my drives - refers to damaged trees in the woods and says that only these are beautiful. Pema Chodron says - trying to improve and get better is a subtle aggression against the self .


The lotus grows out of mud, and being an IT worker, that is my mud. Hence it is only normal that I see consciousness as a large complex computer program processing its own debug output.

To use a non-computer analogy, I will use writing, because there is there is a lot of writing on blogs and such about how computer programming comes closest to writing. We can debate that another day.

To use an analogy that doesn't involve computers, imagine that you've hired a writer to write a large essay on current events , but you have only limited access to him, or his writing - let's say he sends partially complete drafts a.k.a drafts by post ( snail mail), and fails to do so sometimes. Since you have an idea what the final essay looks like - it touches this location, that group, that recipe, that invention etc you  keep a list of key points on a slip of paper, and read through the reports and do a bit of course correction here and there. In this analogy, the essay being written is reality, the drafts you get are the snapshots your senses take now and then, and the list of points in your hand is your course plotted on your map*, or your mental model of how reality should be -  whether the writing follows grammar rules, has analogies, anecdotes, whether it references or includes scientific data , whether the writing is flowery and has flourishes, whether you insist on a typewriter or a fountain pen or a ball-point pen, in cursive or italic - these are your conventions - religious, optimized for profit, convenient, ordered from above etc.
Your map gets formed as you go on, and your course also changes accordingly with new information -   young blood blazes a course through much changes of employment fueled by the winds of youth, ideals and raw energy,   coming of middle age charts a slow course through a suburban house and steady job, education helps form new friends or enemies - etc
Mental illness is when you don't open your mail, write your own essay ,and then dismiss it as lacking.  Anxiety could be not receiving mail for a couple of periods, or not opening your mail for a couple of periods, and losing touch with the essay being written.

An entity is only known through its differences from other entities. Hence dependent arising of identity. Buddha rocks !

 The null, from which everything deviates = Brahman. That from which nothing can deviate = Tao. Hmm.. if the null is the core of everything, both are equivalent ?

This is a very large post and I haven't seen the video yet. Waities.

Saw some more of the video - quite an interesting debate - I find myself agreeing with both of them at all times even though they are on opposite sides.

JP says : you write papers because they make you think

I was reading Superfreakonomics when ...

The authors claim that the shoe bomber failed to ignite his shoe bomb and kill anybody, yet security measures brought in to prevent future shoe bombings cost airline passengers to lose 1065 years , or the entire lives of 14 people.

How to make use of this time ? Combine distributed crowd-sourced commodity computing (Iexec white-paper)  and the design for body-movement-phone charger, and people standing in the queue can be working out charging their phones, all the while renting out the computation power of the phones to the 'net, so that they get paid and their insurance premium comes down too.
Two birds with one stone. Aw yeah !

The Shib would probably get providers from  Aliexpress ...

There's a fun list of ideas here -

https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/extraordinary-smartphone-chargers/

The one that triggers my delight is the one which uses heat from a boiling pan to create electricity to charge your phone. This has been an ongoing thing with me - best improvements seem to come from harnessing li. Very Tao.  Most of human progress involves using processes and tools that require not thinking. And hence these frequently go against the li of nature.
The fabulous Prius uses the moving car's need to lose energy fast to charge the battery . All that energy was going waste all these days. Wham ! impressive mileage and a higher value car with phenomenal gas savings when driving within the city.
Similarly , here's a list of things I 'brainstormed', after watching a bicycle driven washing machine ..

These are ,in order -
a) A hydraulic charger leveraging people's & car's needs to descend from
b) a potential energy battery , and cranks connected to, say, gyms and escalators
c) a small body charger consisting of a wind up spring and a bull worker
d) desert cooler (adiabatic expansion wala)
e) sloping streets friendly to skateboards and scooters
and some old goldies
f) fresnel heater and steamer, fresnel net roofing
g) solar still desalinator pipes

I will go in more detail in these soon.

The Singularity will take us to Mars and beyond. It will create nano-machines that will crawl our bloodstream and handle Defense & Repairs.  It will create matter compilers , molecular transmuters and 3d printers so that we can feed any old material and create anything from modern day manufactured items to food, to biological tissue and organs . It will be, as Gibson says, the end of economics.
Until then, we must work as midwives, easing its entry into the world.

JP thinks that the world population is around 7 billion , and it would peak at around 9 billion and then fall rapidly. Until then, there is going to be a tremendous demand on ,of course, food & water, shelter & sanitation, transportation, medical &  health services, and then on learning, training & education.
Existing systems, businesses and institutions will have to learn to handle scale growth in their users.

According to YNHarari we have the means to create enough food and water for all the world to eat. All scarcity today is due to existing political structures & incumbents which do not permit upgrading of facilities for fear of loss of power.

There are open source village construction kits which can be leveraged to setup communities in wastelands ( not cleared forests please).

There is enough free and high quality video and text content on the internet for volunteers to bring people to the fold of beyond-high-school mathematics.

Still, ideology and irrationality are the largest drivers of human awareness. McLuhan famously said "I'll see it when I believe it", and so while the Singularity, and Plenty are knocking furiously on our doors, the masses can only see the world from the scarcity of previous failed movements like communism and casteism. More rational models ,like we can do more with less thanks to brains and science,  have not yet spread enough , however the mind of man can quickly assimilate any idea that is in his favor.

hints

two of the things I read today mentioned "hell yeah or no", - manson and levitt(tlaf). Adding sivers, that makes it 3 . What is the universe telling me ?

Also, the missing connect between Cialdini and T. Harv Eker - no one I like is asking me to do it, no one I have made rich and is now helping me back, no one I know is getting rich for me to copy, I have no consistency to maintain in being wealthy - spousal environment is a weak link , no one with authority is ordering me to become rich, there is no scarcity of rich people on the planet.
Weird ?

Kahneman is all about hot and cold thinking. Somebody said civilization is victory of cold over hot. Or slow over fast.

What to have for lunch ? Revisited

The pithy formula for health is " eat less, move more, relax".

Further detailed advice on the first part, ie, eating is thus :  "eat food, mostly plants, not too much" .also see.

However, there is help to be found in the two linked articles in the original post. Matt Might's specific algorithm is as follows :

First, create a food journal, and add daily entries covering what you ate, and estimated calories.

Make a list of specific exercises that you do ,with calorie burnt in a per-minutes-of-exercise basis, for each.

Now, two working numbers are calorie requirement, and BMR. Ensure daily that any and all calories over BMR are burnt off by exercise.  Track this too in the journal.

The body will not take to this deficit kindly, and will encourage you to binge on chocolates or coffee with milk and sugar, or even large meals. You can hack this in parts with :

- eat meals at specific times in a day

- eat more protein, and drink more water

- use milk-less sugar-less versions of caffeine . This is a toughie.

- weight training. This boosts BMR.  Caveat - in my case , this will be after basic bx fitness, followed by maintenance yoga for at least , say, 6 months.

- Practice meditation. It is one way to drop out of your mind and 'take a hike in the woods', so to speak. It increases happiness and will (won't) power. TM and Zazen and breath meditation are all not that different.

- the more items you cook yourself, the more meaningful food becomes, and more control is to be had. And more integrated your experience becomes.

- use bursts of mad out exercise to keep it fun - when you really push your limits ,you get a glimpse of the better you.

- join competitions. for fun. winning will follow.
- eat slowly. This works as a meditation as well as a way to eat less.

A day in the life

I am tempted to add 'worthless' before the 'life' in the title but Chad Fowler has asked to stamp out cynicism, and Toit_Lover tagged my '72 % water 100% useless' meme forward as 'dark'.
So I won't.

Luckily ,was able to prime a bit this morning  - getting started with a tiny bit of Tony before the Tiny Banana kidnapped my phone to draw on Google Keep - yet another hobby of mine  - scrawling on Keep .
We try to keep her away from phones 'coz she's developing a squint and I want to avoid a costly surgery in the future.
The 4bx went off well, as Tiny-Mom was out of the house in the morning doing her run and I got the kitchen to myself. Chores completed quickly - (had to fend off helpful parents - and was out of the house as soon as Tiny-Mom came in.  An effective pattern to keep in mind for .. well - daily.

The drivecast today was Tony, a break from the regular Ajahn Brahm (AB), probably because I feel
can-do-ish. 

I have so many books on InternetArchive, O'Reilly Safari, plain PDFs and in paper to complete - I am so overwhelmed. There are books on Taoism on IA which I might not find elsewhere. Buddha in the Robot is something I look forward to completing. While I first referenced it in Lance Daybreak pieces by Erik Davis, I feel Gary Zukav might have started the Hua-Yen new -age nonsense with this book, and that all else are derivative ..
Sadly, in many things, I have forever been living in the dim light of the derivative for ages, missing the core , the heartwood of culture.

Norbert Weiner's Cybernetics is going to be my life long goal. I need to finish it before I die. Seriously. Then comes Herbert Simon and Shannon. Chaos Theory can wait.

There's lunch with SuperLiar-DeliciouslyDeluded-Hustler-snakeoilsaleman-spirit-animal-Fakebastard.


I also want 2019 to focus on economic sense, and psychological well being.

We come back to this again and again - workouts make me feel 'alive'. If only there as a way to not let being overcast affect the workouts.

Immediate reading list :
* Portable mba - finance & accounting
* Dhammapada - eknath easwaran

Eventual reading:
* microeconomics -varian
* macroeconomics cartoon guide

Hey ,guess what, one down  two down , three to go - exercise & writing is done,  remaining is cooking, reading and socializing.

For the unsufferable mid-week, when getting out of bed itself is a challenge, I propose hitting limits - like running without restraint, or back-permitting - lifting, to remember what  muscles make up the me. The daily restricted existence dulls the will to live.  Moustache !!

What to have for lunch ?

My Basal Metabolic Rate = 1835 calories per day. The daily calorie requirement is around 2202.
Calculator here

By consuming the daily requirement, but using exercise to create a caloric surplus, one can achieve weight loss.

Along the way, loss of weight will reduce the BMR, and also metabolism and appetite.
While cardio might be the simplest and easiest form of exercise,  weight training can build muscles which increase the BMR. This needs higher protein consumption
Yoga can heal or improve ligament strength, and can also trigger homeostasis, eliminating biological urges during the time that follows the session.

So can one simply eat 1.411 kilos of short grain cooked rice daily to meet the requirement ?

No, that's not enough. We need some of the calories to come from carbohydrates, some from fat and some from proteins.
And we haven't touched upon the topic of minerals , vitamins, and fibre.

Also, monoculture is not your friend, as eating the same diet will blow up any small nutrient deficiencies into disastrously larger ones, at which point you might need intervention in the form of, say, a B12 injection, or large enough diet change to throw off your calculations.

There are also essential nutrients which are found only in certain foods, or have to be supplemented using man-made product.

SCD, and the Taoist diet asks you to avoid grains.  Some vegetables are not SCD OK.

Yoga asks you to avoid meat, and preferably spiced, oily foods .

Keto needs you to avoid carbohydrates.

Diabetes avoidance needs you to avoid processed foods, and any with high glycemic index. This includes Ragi.

Dr. Jason Fung wants you to eat two meals a day. Jains want you to stop eating after sunset, and also not carry over food past the night into the next day.

We will leave vegans alone for now.

It is generally considered good practice to eat fixed meals at fixed times.

Replacing cigarettes in the chain-smoking habit with tea or coffee is also not good.

Some people went without sugar for a month and reported higher levels of energy and mental sharpness.

Two great links from the same author

One nutshell idea of health is this - eat less, move more, relax. Once this is in the bone, you can start tuning into quality of the things you eat or the workouts you do.
Relax is underrated.  There's a reason the Buddha is seen at every spa or massage parlor.

well folded

lol.
If the next video's not adowable, I don't know what is :

https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/a1QodVD_460svvp9.webm

world maps

You can use openstreetmap tiles for testing purposes, but the volunteer driven organization will not be able to support your maps -tiles  requests if you are serving a lot of traffic commercially.

So cough up and go to mapbox.
My examples run on a free developer mapbox key.  I look forward to completing a Ukiyo-e Risk game or a cybernetic dope-wars...
Google maps shows me a darkenend map for me now.

Or git-gud and setup your own tileserver, the entire world's maps are downloadable. No serious.

There's also wikimapia but I haven't checked it out.

We set out to create a places & merchants map based tool, but have ended up here, writing this post.

A friend is interested in the Iexec whitepaper. He wants to code up a blockchain backed distributed computational system. I am still confused : if you aren't able to generate hashes ,your entries will not go into the blockchain, right ? If so how can you make this into a determinate dependable system ?
Time will tell ...

Spring boot guides are going well. All my previous attempts stalled at some stage of setup or getting v0 to run. I guess the thing to remember here is to start with working systems.

There's a laundry list of chores to complete to get your Spring application Production-ready, as per heroku documentation. These range from logging, to adding metrics, ssl , rate limiting, alerting, error and maintenance pages,  uuids for postgres keys etc.
Spring documentation only asks you to add a Procfile.  However, there's also moving to production which introduces our old friend JMX  , which Berlin choose to use via Jolokia.

One idea that surfaced in today evening's Metropolis Chai run was that we should have an electronics store for people moving to Bangalore, containing - say, headphones, computer speakers, large monitor, maybe desk and chair .. .etc

Why not build a chinese pagoda using cardboard ? There is no end to decorative things one can make out of cardboard,paper with scissors, paint and glue.

And oh hey, a Cracked.com writer took apart Fight Club and gave it a new life. A different one.

Most of work involves lowering of barriers to things, so that they can be done with less mental 'lift'. There's a book called 'Deep work' . However, if you can't do the heavy lifting in one session, you'll need to sow the ideas and have the brain connect them over time and places. Sometimes my brain wakes up after a day or a week. It always connects when talking to a friendly-capable. The office is full of hostiles.

Ajahn Brahm mentioned in a talk that there is no will power, only won't power, as the decision you think you are taking has already been taken for you in the core part of your brain, and the awareness and action parts only get the message a little later - which is when you 'know'. So you are always aware of yourself doing the wrong thing  ,if you noticed . You have 3 seconds or milliseconds, am not sure, to catch the impulse - hence - won't power.
I'd like to draw your attention to the parallel :

* Thus spake the Master Programmer: "When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave."

Tao Te programming say " Go for the hand not the ball"

I can start putting all my knowledge in a searchable database. But why ?

Overabundance of material

 - "We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge"

The world's treasures lay undisturbed in sites like   Project  Gutenberg, Sacred-Texts.com etc.
For e.g , you can get all the Kai Lung stories on Project Gutenberg.

I chanced upon the Internet Archive , made the mistake of digging deep,  and now it  has put  one hundred obligations upon me.

I found cartloads of old villains  - Koestler's The lotus and the Robot  -which covers just past Freedom India and Japan from a westerner's raw unsympathetic point of view ,    a whole bunch of Thomas Cleary books , and I can never get done with all the Taoism and Zen that he translated - that man must've been a prodigy or maniac , some of the portable MBA series, clausewitz, sun tzu,  a lot of - get this - Donald C Laird books . His Technique of Getting Things Done predated GTD by almost a century and thanks to a doting, dutiful father, was on my reading desk in school, the stories seared on to my brain. Unfortunately, they did not help me in college.

I also found Y Perelman books - the lovely Physics for Entertainment and Figures for Fun series..

My Oreilly Safari is loaded with titles in relevant playlists. I see the appeal of  rebirths now - so much to read is there , though in my case I will even consider the option ,if offered , to  come back as a ghost and haunt libraries ...

There is no shortage of blog articles advising against 'self-improvement' and reading material promising 'the way'. And my shelf is full of books I will never read.  There are even printouts of blog articles among the books.

What is this disease of book/knowledge hoarding ? Whither deliverance ?

oh gawd please halp

Source : https://9gag.com/gag/aPY9yyQ

I've starting bookmarking 9gag pages that tickle either my samaritan  or singularity-ian senses.

Have you tried my Wu-Tang style [ass whoopin] ?

For 2019, I want to stop reading books , and also read one million books. I still want to learn calculus, even though I've gone through it in school AND college.

Somebody made a list - economics ,psychology, persuasion, making-selling, computing..
Somebody had a one app a month game..
Somebody wrote about taming perfection ..
Somebody talked about diversification - of identity as a means to resilience ...

There are certain key practices that need to be followed. These have a linear correlation to improvement in quality of life.  Instead of the one million preparatory exercises one might as well get on the horse right away.

Do you think I can make a chinese pagoda/ tea house  out of paper and glue and paint ? or plaster of paris ? Do you think I can make a car or windmill with my 9v dc motor and amazon packing cardboard ?
Do you think I will be able to stick the soles of my shoes back on with the glue I bought ?

Now listening : Wu Tang Clan - The saga continues  : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO52lVctrPg
Now reading  : paper or pdf or online ? gawd

I hope I solve breakfast in 2019.

Will board games and digital executive assistants make the scene ?

Hoodi market on a late weekday morning is awesome ! Bought ginger just for kicks. One guy said there's no supply of Entero anywhere. Nearby shop put paid to that !.

Boiled rice and kadala curry !! When will you happen ?

Of all the Terry Pratchett characters, I find Granny's suspiciousness the most relate-able.

No think un think

 "How do you learn to unthink? Dylan believes the creative impulse needs protecting from self-analysis: “As you get older, you get smarter, and that can hinder you…You’ve got to programme your brain not to think too much.” Flann O’Brien said we should be “calculatedly stupid” in order to write. The only reliable cure for overthinking seems to be enjoyment, something that both success and analysis can dull. Experienced athletes and artists often complain that they have lost touch with what made them love what they do in the first place. Thinking about it is a poor substitute."

From the Economist - via ranprieur.com

 https://www.1843magazine.com/content/ideas/ian-leslie/non-cogito-ergo-sum

Zen has been all about this with the no-mind.
So has been Gallwey's Inner game of tennis.

I'm starting to see considerable number of echoes in the mainstream, that too from orthogonally related areas.

Gigerenzer makes another appearance . I have a link from an article in my K-paper bookmarks folder, and a book by him in my amazon wish list.

From now on, I should put all my for-later and wouldn't-it-be-nice mumblings here .

Today's Cracked.com reading. Cracked continues to be gold, but only in places now). Still,

6Harsh creates nausea and panic , unless you're nodding as you read it, which means you're on the other side. It works paired with 5Sabotage below for actual action items. Combined with the 60 second test, you should have a measuring tool.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-youre-sabotaging-your-own-life-without-knowing-it/
- focussing on how instead of why
- forgetting what will be missed out if you do something new, like working out
- no magical change - you're not going to be something tomorrow that you are not today.
- focussing on the whole instead of the steps - so wrong and impossibly daunting .
- you lie to yourself. Basically you confuse your  'should's for 'must's, taking solace in them, rather than cry in pain and panic at your unfulfilled 'must's. Thank you Tone Robbins. You never cease to amaze.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19468_5-logical-fallacies-that-make-you-wrong-more-than-you-think.html

Bonus points : https://markmanson.net/how-to-make-better-life-decisions
MM for boundaries.

Pentoz on LinkedIn showed a bicycle driven washing machine.  I used this opportunity to invent in my head a potential energy battery . I also remembered and amazone'd and google-pdf-ed old Ya Perelman books. Got some.

time to stop, setup camp and take a stand

sorry folks, but this here's the most beautiful thing ever, that I've seen

https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/aq7vGGR_460svvp9.webm

India will have the largest working age population in 2027
They will need training ,services and information.

hello mr robot

I feel like Christian Slater is the Saif Ali Khan of the west. The voice is  toned down but similar. So is the I'm-smarter-than-you attitude ...

I've had it till here about conspiracy theories about 'them' and a 'group' of people controlling 'everything'. Anyone who's worked in any sort of hierarchy would know that that sort of thing is nigh impossible. It's hard enough to control ONE person, talk about all.

If green lizard men from outer space rule the Earth, I'm sure people will find a nash  equilibrium soon enough.

Has a voice-over-narration which reminds me of Fight Club. Has the same my-life-is-fucked-but-I-talk-normally tone

"You sense there's something wrong with the world"
Matrix.

Wipe out all credit card debt. That's from Fight Club.

Matrix meets Fight Club meets Office Space.

Episode 2 is named eps1.1_ones-and-zer0es.mpeg" . Welcome to the desert of the real ,indeed.

Sega font.

They themselves call it Evil Corp.

Bullshit Jobs

In the course of Graeber’s diagnosis, he inaugurates five phyla of bullshit work. “Flunkies,” he says, are those paid to hang around and make their superiors feel important: doormen, useless assistants, receptionists with silent phones, and so on. “Goons” are gratuitous or arms-race muscle; Graeber points to Oxford University’s P.R. staff, whose task appears to be to convince the public that Oxford is a good school. “Duct tapers” are hired to patch or bridge major flaws that their bosses are too lazy or inept to fix systemically. (This is the woman at the airline desk whose duty is to assuage angry passengers when bags don’t arrive.) “Box tickers” go through various motions, often using paperwork or serious-looking reports, to suggest that things are happening when things aren’t. (Hannibal is a box ticker.) Last are “taskmasters,” divided into two subtypes: unnecessary superiors, who manage people who don’t need management, and bullshit generators, whose job is to create and assign more bullshit for others.

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