boredom is catnip for creativity

oh books

Nutrition sheet, logs etc

It just stumped him. Now he couldn't think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: ``Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.'' It was a stroke of insight.
She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn't think of anything to say, and couldn't understand why, if she couldn't think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.
..
..
..

He told her angrily, ``Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.''
..
..
..

Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. ``I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,'' she said, ``and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don't understand it.'

----------------------- ZMM, Part III, Chapter 16

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

----------------------- SICP Chap 1 

I was putting down nutrition information in a spreadsheet. I tired of it, and after a few days it struck me that I should be coming in from the other end. So I made a list of 'ingredients', and linked the sheets to the earlier reference, and decided to sum up the cals.
While discussing, I came up with the idea of a minimal mealpack-  peanuts, with onions, tomatoes and cucumber.

Marketing and branding is one, repeated consistent service is another. The former is signaling.

The next step would be to put all goals in one row, so that comparison is intuitive, and the progression  & trade offs are easier to calculate. [Ref SICP quote]

arguing on the internet #1

"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an Atheist, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you"


- someone , attributed to WH.


Only because science is all models, and all models are wrong and some are useful (1) , but G/god is a story , a narrative, and the part of the brain that handles emotion connected narrative is like Africa compared to the part of the brain that handles logic and abstraction which is like  London, so the brain more 'story's things than 'logic's things .

Story is the water to us whales , and air the logic we come up to take in.

//Wow, I excel myself. This is going on my blog.



God the model is comprehended by the neocortex and God the story is comprehended by the large continent-like mammalian brain. So ,while cerebrally discussing , one might agree that the God/Bible is a story, when it's gut reaction time, lots of human behaviour patterns start following the characters in the scriptures....


science is the sharp edge of human collective consciousness, narrative & story the gooey middle of it - a fog of goo with prickles on the outside ( see Alan Watts Prickles & Goo)


so what this means is when a swarm needs to expand, it hauls out the scientific apparatus, and discovers things, and then commoditizes it so that the middling masses can use it without knowing more than 'God', or 'Comrade Stalin' or 'Civilization' made it possible - ( today all sorts of yahoos can use cellphones without knowing the name of Shannon )


The closer to the edge you get, the much pricklier it gets, with much lower tolerances.

It follows the center is completely vapor.


(1) George Box

beer game

Have been on the economics game wagon for the last couple of days. This has resulted in multiple tycoon games being installed on the mobile (and quickly uninstalled),  drooling of caesar and railroad tycoon on Steam, and a one session run-in with Virtonomics online, that will in all probably never be revisited.
Had a run in with the beer game a long time back. It is supposed to be a game in optimization - supply chains, feedback, knapsacks ...

The wikipedia page throws up a nice set of ghosts - system dynamics, feedback control theory, peter senge's 5th discipline and fieldbook....
second level ghosts thrown up are Forrester, with his Urban & Industrial dynamic books, and also
Principles of Systems which is in our reading list... which precludes Calculus, Rudin , ....

Of course, feedback & control tips us in to the lake of Cybernetics, with Weiner, Ashby , Maturana, Varela, Pask , peter Turchin, Principia Cybernetica ....

More 2019

0. Here is a revolutionary idea - use money to make your life better than the others around you. Signalling, investments & asset, hobby items .

1. Learn to think statistically. Not just learn, but do that a lot. Life is a numbers game. This goes hand in hand with Diversification . Of identity, investments, effort etc.

2. Start a business. Remember the lesson of compounding. With a 30% tax and a 15 % sales tax every Rs. 100 you earn is worth Rs. 67. And this shit doesn't compound.

3. Progress one step a day. Want a perfect diet ? Count your macros on day 1, count protein for the next two etc keeping track-log as you go.  You'll soon have a list of things to eat and not-eat. Then you can do a fixed-cal foodpacks and not eat anything else the whole day.

4. Leverage your writing habit and blog to get some paper-writing and novel-writing practice.

5. Planning and execution - blog-paper-plan(goals-objectives-deadlines)-schedule-review. No need to keep things in your head. All daydreams go into a blog post or document. The items that need action go to a plan with steps and deadlines. These are reviewed until solved. Single document for goals and objectives.

6. Introversion, rejuvenation and rest.  Where, when & how do I work best ?

7. Repetition is key to building skill.