Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Wit & Wisdom

Wit means having capacity for inventive thought & quick understanding, having a keen intelligence.
Wisdom is the quality of having experience, knowledge and good judgement.
The two cover everything about competence, effectiveness etc.

Wednesday, February 20, 2019

fasting feels NICE !!!

it makes me lighter, more flexible, makes the energy flows more easily ...

fasting/emptying brings back appetite and appreciation

the emptiness of the time brings perspective and 'puts down the cup' ,like AB said.

reading Joko Beck, with threads to Yasutani ,Kapleau, Myoyu Roshi and the Great Plains Zen Center.

XMind is really good. Unloaded my brain in like half an hour. Imagine what daily practice with that can do.

Some notes/ advice
Problem solving: divide into pieces, test each piece separately.
Progress : tracer bullets, one feature a day
Critical thinking : when/where things are and when/where they aren't.
Goals : people around you , not just physically -   | , what you can do - --   yields  |--

zen lessons
do lesser things, slowly, better than last time, with full attention
fast on and off to reconnect
acknowledge and let emotions slide, try not to be swayed by them
work so that you improve slowly but surely, so that in a month, year, progress is  visible
AB
allow yourself to be happy
move so that you get closer to happiness

intelligence w/o principle = cunning ?

My earning, reading, doing, liking and what's on my resume are not aligned.

Gandhi - "Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."

Sunday, February 10, 2019

you hit me I hit you ?

You hit me I hit you ,that's fair, and a part of your mind is satisfied
You hit me and I hit you, and now there are two persons with hurt instead of one, and that is worse than one person being hurt.

If I give you a bottle with one thousand million pills and line up all the  people in your life - family, workers, colleagues, neighbours, favorite actors, authors etc and ask you to give them each one pill from your bottle, knowing that all but one will make the person who consumes it very happy for a day, but one person will die from taking it. Will you do it ? For a million dollars ?

You can always argue that there are higher chances of getting hit by a bus ( 2 in a million), so there is no culpability here, and that the payout was justified.

One part of you will always know that it was your hand that killed that person, that his/her spouse and children will now never get what your spouse and children are getting ( assuming), and that every time you play with your child, your heart will feel a pang for the victim's child.

At what point does this leak into your life that what you have is unfair, and so you start mis-treating your family to make it fair to the dead person ?

Ref :Fight Club - this is your greatest moment - the narrator had been living life off of dead people, his work paid off when he helped the car company pay claims to people who had taken the poison pill.
What  division of labor forgets is the complexity of the human mind, and it connects everything to everything else. Hence , the 'finest moment' here means the narrator chooses to make his life out of the burns suffered.  If there is no burning of flesh, he will not have a job, and as Cracked pointed out in its phenomenally brilliant article - , you _are_ your job, even though Tyler literally says otherwise in the film. And as a human being who is neurologically programmed against this sort of thing, the paradox between the man and his job sends him to therapy. He lucks out ,because he only suffers from sleep therapy - if he had known what was troubling him, it would be either prozac or a suggestion to change jobs, and Bam!, no Fight Club - which is what is probably happening in the real world.
Division of labour allows for a large aggregation of human beings ,including Nina from accounts- receivable, and those who walk around with salads, to perform atrocities as burn humans alive, all the while hiding behind beige office cubes and the arguments of chance and livelihood.
Combined with psychotherapy, of course.

The irony here is , like the  'you are not your job' one, therapy is supposed to help one learn to accept and work with the pain, which is usually reality seen through your faulty model (Box!), and to stop
escaping via the numbing devices one has started to habituate; whereas it is equal parts, if not more, a source of numbing pills in itself !

All life comes from other lives, even vegetarians kill the plants they eat. Only plants are the purest forms of life, living off sunlight, air and water. And nitrates in the soil. Sun, air, water, nitrates in the soil.

Thanks to Mark Manson and his articles for laying the field out so clear ,
and to Jordan Peterson for his message of standing up for oneself

science fiction to business proposals

Isn't it time for the science fiction of the 70s to transcend into the business proposals of the 20s ?

Sf has already seeped into literature, with works on the Singularity blurring the line between sf and near future technology. 


Thanks to Elon Musk we have  reusable space launchers ,though no space elevators yet.
There is some talk of  nano machines on the interwebs, but mostly some clips on 9gag ,  which we know wouldn't lie.
There are robots everywhere except in the daily life - robots on the production line,  computer vision assisted quality control,   robots with guns, robots with machine guns, walking robots, horse robots, dog robots .. .and this is not counting the retail /consumer robots. The field of moving weapons, autonomous or remote controlled, has taken off. (snort snort)
There are now remote control planes and unmanned cars.

We can edit genes and make super babies (CRISPR?).

Gibson's stuff is almost true, leaving aside space travel. There is the matrix, wearable devices are nudging the barrier to reality,  glasses that beams feed into your eye directly while being connected to the internet...
Stross's wearable cameras on cops are real in some places already, so are digital, within-game valuables. The dark web supposedly exist, and south american drug lords supposedly use neural networks to set prices of cocaine (?)

All of this remains highly energy negative, as in burns ton of hydrocarbon to move people and charge machines. Cold fusion is not here, neither is a cure for cancer.

Cryptonomicon's crypto currency is here, so is  Gibson's idoru.




Thursday, February 07, 2019

a philosophy and notes


1. Prescriptive - 5BX, diet and meditation for superpowers
2. Do things daily. Incomplete & imperfect are okay. Missing a day is not.
3. Quantity. over quality. Ship regularly


1.

5BX is a set of exercises with an increasing level of complexity and intensity.  5BX has warmup and stretches built in, and culminates in a heart straining on-the-spot jogging or walk/run alternatives.

It has multiple charts ( A-F) with multiple levels within each. The progression takes 4 days per each, level, worked daily, for around 15 levels.

Over the long term, done daily, it increases stamina, endurance& flexibility . This is built in into the exercises. The on the spot jogging ( not the walking substitute) breaks a sweat, and puts me out of the lethargic zone. Mood perks up almost immediately.
On the days when this is not doable, see if you can do a walk or a yoga session.

2. The core principle is to do something on a daily basis towards the life I want.

3.
Shipping regularly, somewhat less than perfect items ,that too daily, will eventually get you there. Shipping a perfect thing happens once a lifetime, never more
this also means -  get t-shirts printed, talk to people etc do things before you are ready

among the corollaries - follow these - go for expertise and depth. These pay off. There must be effort on expertise, with results , for over a year.
Go for bold large attempts instead of feeble tip-toeing.

Work on habits . Do tasks that affirm identity, no matter how feeble they maybe. ( from
 https://sivers.org/book/AtomicHabits, Tony)

Tuesday, February 05, 2019

crypto reading list


Following the blockchain craze ,a friend asked me for a reading list. Below is what I know but haven't read completely (except the last one) . They should be enough to get you to a good place.
 a) The Code Book by Simon Singh
 b) Handbook of Applied Cryptography : http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/hac/
 c) Security Engineering by Ross Anderson
 d) Designing an authentication system in four acts [ Article] http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www/dialogue.html
 e) Alice & Bob Dinner after speech : https://urbigenous.net/library/alicebob.html Last one is hilarious

16/9/18
adding one more
f) Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier

5/2/19
adding two more
g) Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson- this is a large large blog article masquerading as three intertwined stories involving ww2, a modern tech startup involving crypto , a math wizard .... I first read it in 2004, and it was water in the parched ideological desert of Mumbai. For someone who had read Levy's Hackers and ESR's Revenge of the Nerds , it was a sign . However, faith loosened in the onslaught of the mundane, and I am left writing about it.
h) Stephen Levy's Crypto - this is recommended. I will read it.


I have also some python code encrypting and decrypting stuff. An excerpt of the Prisoner of Zenda lent itself to the process. The basic version was completed in one evening ( an adult evening is interspersed with chores, dinner, walking, babysitting, parent-sitting, neighbour-ing, spouse-whispering, lot of nodding while listening ... etc ). The java version took much longer and doesn't do so much.

here : https://github.com/goingkilo/python_practice.git