yesterday and tomorrow

Yesterday's philosophy is tomorrow's engineering and the day-after's out-sourced commodity.
Heraclitus didn't like the concept of the eternal.


"This... 'stuff'? Oh... ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff."
- Miranda Priestly,The Devil wears Prada

mandating fun

The economist article
says do not corporatize fun.

Book and quote, lewis thomas and Zorg

"I don't like warriors. Too narrow-minded, no subtlety. And worse, they fight for hopeless causes. Honor? Huh! Honor's killed millions of people, it hasn't saved a single one. Tell you what I do like though: a killer. A dyed-in-the-wool killer. Cold-blooded, clean, methodical and thorough. Now a real killer, when he picked up the ZF-1, would have immediately asked about the little red button on the bottom of the gun"
Zorg, The Fifth Element

I was craving biology today . So I found this at home. Interesting book. Was recommended in school by Rahul, but I didn't get with it. It now ties in with my cybernetics and emergent systems madness.

Got my hands on "Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World". The clerk at the library said the book was not available in the centre we were in, whereas our research had pointed otherwise.When we found the book, I wondered if I could hit the guy across the face with it, because , you know, if it didn't exist in this particular centre, he wouldn't feel anything if we hit him with something that didn't exist ...

Did you know that in the movie "Empire of the Sun", the little boy who is the main character is actually Christian Bale !?! Talk about paying your dues ...

lowest first

digging deep the trenches of complexity
and ever widening circles of assault
the centre cannot hold

transcending abstractions

Alan Watts talk

-The double bind that is the deepest of all is, You must go on living. Living is a spontaneous process, and an art, and to say to life, "You must happen," is ...

- The basic form of the double bind which is imposed upon all children is the requirement to do that which will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily. ...

plat's cave of shadows

the mind is like a box. it is three dimensional and has three-dimensional objects within it.

the act of naming the objects with names of our choosing , or according to convention of our choosing , creates two-dimensional imprints on one of the surfaces of the box, which are then used for communication with other 3dbox-having-robots.

it is possible to remember the three-dimensional nature of these imprints with constant conversation but it is also easy to forget their nature over time

thus language fails over time

dude, seriously !!

you gotta watch the intro on this thing
hmm. interesting. I'd like to correlate this with skinner,scvngr's dynamcics(47 of them),dan pink -drive,dan ariely,amos tversky and kahneman, buddha's brain....
onwards on to matrix,vance packard...
cyberpunk - trodes,matrix surfing, t.vs which watch you(orwell) ...,mind reading helmets

book alert

vance packard : the hidden persuaders
If I'd gotten this book when I had powershift and third wave in my hands, I'd probably not have been confused for eight years...
-----
this should go in ortrta:
the enslavement path - any being/machine/system which has multiple states and there is atleast one path which makes the machine 1.keep itself running 2.do an additional something
such that 2 doesn't interfere with 1, there will soon come an enslaver on the scene...

looking for > arthur koestler : the lotus and the robot

the void and the cosmology

I am nothing
I am everything
flower garland


***

I'd like to offer something to help you but in the zen school we don't have a single thing!
- Ikkyu

***

dopamine spikes

Dopamine spikes are like sudden infusions of capital into a flat economy -sort of like IT money into Bangalore - there's inflation, and if you're not careful, a depression follows.
So, be wary of highs..

Also, since attention is biased more towards sticks than carrots**, negativity is a much bigger force than commonly acknowledged.
And since the brain reinforces what is already inside, negativity leads to more negativity. Depression is next.
A solution is this : a habit of positive thinking is needed. A habit specifically because habits are more un/sub-conscious and conscious doing is hindered by what's already on the mind.
Enter God/religious/spiritual practices/Happy place/ etc - there are different mechanisms

** that's why everyone's always cribbing, that's why you don't know the value of something until you lose it - your brain is tuned to look for negatives all day long, not at how things are working correctly

places to intervene

leverage points in a system - link originally seen on ranprieur.com

all that I was afraid of a.k.a city life is killing us

aaaargh aaargh aaargh

the above is a cracked.com link. I agree with most of cracked.com stories. one of these days I'll collect all the 'i told you so' cracked links and put them up somewhere.

cracked martial arts
plus : steven seagal is trained in aikido. ha. thought so

new tech

william gibson's 'trodes

inception

Chuang Tsu's butterfly is, of course, the base premise of the matrix, shutter island, almost all of Philip K Dick's works ...

Dreams are, I suppose , a different matter.

The 'extraction' brings fond memories of William Gibson's Count Zero

new music

Listening to Planewalker - Psychic evolution - First Light on the free label Ektoplazm. is awesome.

gold rat heart jewel

Skinner, automatons, free will

There is Pavlov's classical conditioning, thenthere is Skinner's operant condition.

In this course, as a rat, you will learn to press levers and follow signals and identify symbols on small cardboard squares. You will be rewarded with food and punished with hunger and electric shocks as may be deemed necessary.
As a result of this course you will become a master-lever-operator-light-reader

Operant conditioning
levers and buttons you'll operate
with rewards and punishments
your actions we'll moderate
soon you'll learn to do
what we want you to do
and you'll never want anything else again

Skinner claimed that we humans do things only because we have been conditioned to behave as we do in previous situations. Conditioning is at the level of dopamine secretion, and not at the level of consciousness. Skinner's conclusion was that humans do not have free will, but only have conditioned responses.


I think, what the "Buddha's Brain" people say is that :
behaviours & thinking learned through punishments in operant conditioning are difficult to lose and man suffers much by carrying them around.

new stuff come to light :
kahneman talk on experience vs memory
There is an 'experiencing self' and a 'remembering self'....
hmmm... WAAAOOW !!!

Japan's companies

Japan : Choosing a company

Japan for me represents the most stratified of societies. Hence I'm always interested in studies/commentary on company culture. The linked article has a chart which compares and contrasts various practices and the companies involved.

this is what we all should do

grow your own food ...
http://nymag.com/print/?/restaurants/features/37273/

humor

funny stuff

thomas friedman

Milton Friedman was a respected economist, with credentials.

Thomas Friedman is wrong .

Philip Greenspun and Andy Grove have said so

See also for much fun reading this

a condition

I got no more game. I guess it's time to retract roots and set out to forage ...

this is what happens when division-of-labour creates enough silos

link to story

Game Theories

game theories
This is an article about MMORPG economies, and how they could be a sandbox for economic experiments. Supremely fascinating read.

Self deception

Our brains are belief engines. They have a tendency to seek and find patterns.They have a tendency to fill the gaps and connect the dots . And they will fill the gaps.

We have a need to believe. This gives rise to things like superstition.

watch the full video .


See also: Pavlov's dog, Skinner's rat

TED Talk by Michael Shermer

Other's in the running are (RSAAnimate videos/youtube):
Philip Zimbardo's Powers of time video,
( and also, The Stanford Prison Experiment )
Jeremy Rifkin's Empathic Civillization
- ".. the first drive is the drive to belong. when this is inhibited/repressed, secondary drives such as aggression,violence,narcissism, materialism show up.. "

The Purusha Sukta .. or maybe not

And so the arts and sciences were ordered to stand still, and society was divided and sub-divided into functions and professions, trades and crafts. Every man was doomed to follow the occupation of his father, to marry within his own class, to die as he was born. Hope was torn out of the
human life. Egypt was no longer a nation, but an assemblage of torpid castes isolated from one another and breeding in and in. It was no longer a body animated by the same heart, fed by the same blood,
**
but an automaton neatly pieced together, of which the head was the
priesthood,
the arms were the army, and the feet the working-class.
**
In quiescence it was a perfect image of the living form, but a touch came from without,
and the arms broke asunder at the joints and fell upon the ground.

---
Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man

redundancy

I'm going to stop thinking entirely and start reading zacharyburt

All that I store in scattered ,ripped consciousness & memory is presented line by line, post by post by this guy on his blog.


suggested reading/listening/video-watching : shinzen young and rick hansen

your right to fresh air

Ted talk by 'Kamal Meattle' lists three powerful indoor plants which can
supply all the fresh air you need
line here

--

when you leave
I shall come to the door
but I won't say anything

good things on the net

the RSAnimate videos on youtube are fantastic - the one on time,the one on drive ..
the one on empathy is next.

two movies

Heat
Gun battle in the street. what every boy has day-dreamed and done simulations of ever since we could fold two fingers and say 'bang'. Lovely seaside house . One more thing - check out movie firearms database page for this movie

Enemy of the State
cool electronic gear pressed into law enforcement service (or the other way round) - additional points for the cool gear being government issue.

bonus reco
Snatch
armed robbery, ethnic networks as conduits, attitude, superior game, bad boy ethics ...

double bonus feature
dark knight. is real cool stuff. a hero who's finally not a clown in a cartoon town ...

one more
robocop - for the cyberpunk dystopian streets, a few scenes only, though

Human Tragedy [quote]

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things."

--Whitehead

book purchases

8 May 2010

1. Spook Country
2. Anathem
3. Going Postal
4. What I'm talking about when I'm talking about running
5. Phaedo
6. one of the William series books

Job well done !!

real life zmm

real life zmm

A man with a PhD in Political Philosophy . Who runs a motorcycle repair garage . And is happy.
And successful by any reasonable definition of success.

Don't you want to follow this road too ?

Peter Siebel also has philosophy in his resume.

There must be something in that philosophy thing

kathy sierra video

of how to kick ass

oh professor

the professor sitting at his desk making _tea_

sheriff with a shotgun

Tappan's Junction

douglas adams videos

alan kay videos

alan watts lectures to put you to sleep

life,so true

smbc-comics id=1322

update

The Buddhist Geeks title music is really cool, especially with the Bass boost on..
Dunno about the content. There's one called 'Jedi Mind Training of Concentration' so am investigating.

Today I complete four days of walking four kilometres each day.
Running doesn't work for me because it's too-much-effort-per-step whereas walking is just right.
It meshes easily into my office routine ( no nightouts though ).
Plus I can do it anytime,and also do it wearing my 300 rupee green-cloth-shoes-with-1-inch-soles that I bought in 2006(2007?) and that I like a lot because they were the mascot of my personal freedom movement then..

favorite author

Neal Stephenson has replaced William Gibson as my favorite author for the time being.
This corresponds the move of the life-mood-indicator from the 'poignant' to 'maybe-hackable' posish.
I have followed all the links on Wikipedia and have read through most of his Wired.com interviews, went back to the one about domination systems in reason.com.... currenty reading his short story 'Spew', and I definitely need to get my hands on the 'Hackers' short-story collection.
Spew is just fantastic, and the crunchy-chocolatey goodness just goes up each para after para.
Hope the ending's managed okay.

the magic's gone... and yet !

I re-read my favorite books again , but somehow, the magic's gone.
What was once a gateway to hours of fun , is just a string of words.

The same happens with some of my cherished video games.
I can rip through the motions , kill all the villains and end missions within five to ten
minutes  and come out feeling robbed.

While I have fond
memories of the worlds created in both my books and games, when I go
back, the first thing that hits me is that the experience is scripted and bounded.

The last time a friend of mine was playing Mafia, and was struggling to steer
the taxi AND outrun Morello's hoods at the same time, and I was trying to advise him
on what to do ...  I got a glimpse of myself when the game was completely unfamiliar
yet attractive.

this is me

this is me going through life.
NOT !!

--gif link courtesy reddit

looks like

death won't be coming soon enough....

on the topic of video games

Mafia 2 is on its way ! hurray !

alan watts ,division of labour

Alan Watts talks about division of labour and three types of cultures and shamans (religion of the Hunter culture) in Out of your mind /Disc 10 /The World as self [Part 2]

street corner hood

alan watts and others

Alan Watts on stuff http://www.uncarved.org/OOO/watts.html

My life won't fit in the boxes I put it in... all round process improvement called for.

Also, Timothy Leary & Robert Anton Wilson's 8 Circuits of Consciousness sounds interesting.
I have a video bookmarked on youtube.com, to be viewed later....

Listening to audiobooks/lectures is a great idea greatly facilitated by the mp3 player my mum gave me
There are wind in the willows, wind in the willows(BBC),three men in a boat, hhgttg & asimov-foundation all waiting to be consumed.
Currently Alan Watts lectures are nighttime listening - ease me into sleep superbly..

Downloaded Transcendence(game).is 16 mb.

pan galactic gargle blaster

'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' game here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_andrew.shtml

find of the day

http://www.emusic.com/artist/Natural-Sounds-MP3-Download/11570976.html

nanobots against cancer

you guys must've seen this already..

http://gizmodo.com/5501103/this-is-the-future-of-the-fight-against-cancer

does this mean the Grey Goo problem is a real threat now ?

I think the future's going to be Skynet vs Grey Goo ...

links of the day - two on brain sci, one on soc sci

http://danielmiessler.com/blog/modern-science-on-self-control-and-4-things-you-can-do-immediately-to-improve-it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeJSXfXep4M
http://www.viceland.com/int/v12n1/htdocs/poster.php

like a supernova

reading material

just read this. gripping reading. and reminded me of the temporary camp set up for extracting the scientist Mitchell in Count Zero

the magician is getting ready

Douglas Adams videos

In this one he talks about

- Bali rice farming according to the temple calendar
- Feng Shui and dragons

basically, organic creatures blackbox the complexity of nature , and make good tools for abstracting the universe

roger ebert was right

Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes is good fun . EXCEPT for the fact that Holmes is eccentric bordering on bumbling, and Watson isn't stout.
Still, good watching. Jeremy Brett twisted the image of Holmes in one way. Robert Downey Jr gives it a whack in the opposite direction.
London with its shipyards is superb.

this is what i meant

http://fileit.in/p/31

page-scrape follows

January 2010 I resigned from my well-paying job. I wanted to pursue my dreams, and did not want my career to be a hurdle.

Since then, I have been working as a consultant for a small startup firm Peepal Software, located in Bangalore. I work for them from my home located in Chennai.

I have collected pointers from this experience of mine:

The Joy of Working From Home

• I don't commute anywhere during peak hours. My carbon footprint is considerably reduced.
• I go for long evening walks. I know my neighborhood better. I am healthier.
• I spend enough time with my family.
• I eat less junk food. I cook. I eat freshly made food.
• I contribute all reusable code as OpenSource to WizTools.org. Only specific client code goes to the client source repository.
• I sometime take power-afternoon-nap.
• I work when I am most productive. For example, I have done similar things few times: awoke from sleep in the mid-of-night, for an idea struck at that time. I am able to implement that idea at that time itself.
• I don't need to attend mindless meetings. I don't need to attend useless management programs.
• I get more time to work on my pet-projects (FileIt.in is one of my pet-projects).
• I have more time to pursue my other hobbies like photography.
• I get more time to learn technologies I want to learn.

What I miss working from home?

• Lonely at times. No one around to show off your new shoes, bags and gadgets ;-)

Conclusion

Of course, the benefits overwhelmingly beat the limitations!

(some) human beings can detect cellphone radiation

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-02/disconnected

we'll evolve to be able to PROCESS the stuff...

why recall ?

so that this shit doesn't happen ....
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100225/ap_on_bi_ge/us_toyota_fatal_crash

steve yegge and epic white beard guy

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/math-every-day

also , in one of his posts , he mentions
"I'm not ready to bash on C++ yet. All of this stuff I'm writing, in blogs and the ADJ, is just practice for when I start bashing C++ in earnest, and trust me: when I'm finished, one of us (me or C++) won't be here at Amazon anymore."

The "is just practice " started me giggling like crazy until I remembered this -http://www.destructoid.com/the-weekend-hotness-amber-lamps-164393.phtml- and almost shot  water outta my nose ....

feeling the call of the sea

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_House
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradewinds_(game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windjammer

whether you win or lose

depends on the context you set for yourself

- -

there is too much distraction

might be a good idea

to live with the Amish for a while ...

how about Amish Halfway Houses : resorts which are inspected every once in a while by real Amish
people, so that normal people can live the Amish way ,

But since the Amish depend on oil too, my plan of having this as a Avoid-Oil-Collapse training wouldn't work... or would it ... ?

edit :

added to the books-i-think-ought-to-be-great post ...

oh yeah

we need more of these

black magic that science is making possible

how to hack your brain

and more sf goodness

the books(and movie adaptations) were right, the singularity might happen

daily midwifery

What is every day but an excercise in imposing one's own reality upon the world, and trying not to have other realities imposed upon us by the world.
We are but midwifes who daily seek to bring to life the baby that is one's own vision of the world and its people, and where one's position is decided by oneself and none other ....
Whose reality are you in now ?

fantastic game : globetrotter

here. the music's cool too

these stories feel like a smoker's first cigarette after an 8 hour flight.

they resonates with something within

back to novels

I'm back to the place where I find novels interesting again.
Picked up a John Grisham today. Felt like I've come back to a town I'd left behind
two-three decades ago..

self-referential causes of existence

You must have come across such twists in life. Here's an example :


The Terminator goes back into the past to kill Sarah Connor. All of him gets destroyed except one arm. Cyberdyne reverse engineers the chip(s) in that arm and builds something that eventually becomes Skynet. In the age of Skynet, the Terminator himself is born.

Hence, if the Terminator hadn't existed, he couldn't have existed. Tough one, but there it is.

Ever seen a signboard which says "Beware:This Board Has Sharp Edges"?
What, exactly, is the reason for its existence ? We don't _need_ a board like that , but should one turn up, its presence would, itself, give rise to various possibilities arranged around it - people might stick posters on it and hundreds could show up at a play or a music concert,someone could stick political bills on it and probably swing a local election ,or which might help the local lose a hundred pounds and whatnot.Just saying. There are possibilities. Someone might even, sadly, cut themselves on the sharp edges in spite of the sign's best efforts. ( Apparently such people are crucial ingredient of the universe as we know it )

Not really a non-entity, is that board now ? Should we be even think of it as a non-entity ?
Looks like putting function before form is folly. Foo foo foo. Ignoring reality always is.

I guess such attractors come and go, which give rise to these no-reason-to-exist things, but the question remains whether selves exist which do not share this looped reason for existence ?

Do we in our eagerness to look down smugly upon these seemingly destiny-less creatures ignore our own loopiness ? Are we here because,basically, we're here ? and isn't destiny over-rated anyway ?

If one is the master of one's own destiny, doesn't it mean one has no destiny ?

What if humans were conceived,designed and shot out from the brow of the Creator for the sole purpose of moving cars from place to place ?

how do you handle something precious ?

when you wake up one day and realize that your life is better and that it seems like you're in a dream, what do you do ?
do you rationalize ? do you devalue the good things in your life by being cynical about them ? by telling yourself that it's fate and some get and some don't..
that if you didn't have X , you wouldn't know the difference ?
do you overeat and be mean to people to add some bad karma to even out things ?
can you take joy in what comes your way ?

an un-jaded mind

An un-jaded mind is not to be looked down on

If you remember this, there is still hope

With each passing day there is more to unlearn

And a million joys be lost forever

In every passing moment something else happens

So tell me this ,my friend

When do the good things happen ?

about room s

a room , to be useful, must have atleast one of the two - comfort and/or harmony.
Better rooms have both.

mistaking

cynicism for wisdom....

Lazarus Long (Heinlein) mentioned that it's incredible how much 'mature wisdom' resembles being incredibly tired.

mambo chicken

our superpowers : cracked.com

super powers we are going to get from science :cracked.com

read about the Singularity too, adn the Transhuman condition..

do not confuse the tao with a football

otum

avoiding 'wish' overload

on any festival day, one is programmed to say "Thank you ! Same to you " but secretly each "Same to you" translates to "Dang I was too slow to wish first" and counts as a loss.
This season I'm wishing people .... ONE DAY AHEAD !!!!
MWUhahahahahahaha

ralph koster on fun,magic and deep structure

or did i say hofsdadter ?
the-core-of-fun/

for me this logical follows kathy sierra's podcast on 'how to kick ass'

which in turn refers to, among other things,
- the Woooo !!! feeling
- tim gallwey's the inner game of tennis
- joseph campbell, hero's journey
- cszikszentmihalyi's Flow
other things she said :
mirror neurons, exercise & sleep, visualization,
-
Btw, there's something called 'Game grammars'.
oooh !!

parent adult child

these terms are in my mind today. Was thinking of behaviour and patterns . then it boiled down to people do things differently in different interactions oh wait, that's a _transaction_ okay that means we're back to transactional analysis. apparently this was started by eric berne ( wrote 'games people play' ) and thomas harris apparently watered it down and brought it to 'pop' level.
Adult(tm) behaviour requires ego-lessness. unless you make it a permanent feature of your personality(in which case you won't have regulars) your regulars will not like it and ask you to 'relax' and 'chill out'.

my friend who became a

Me and my friend
used to laugh
at Dilbert jokes
then one day
he became
a manager

Toffler's Third Wave to Creativity

Alvin Toffler said long long ago that the Second Wave is gone and the Third wave is here.
In the chapter titled 'Breaking the code',he describes the rules what define and are enforced by the Industrial wave.
A lot of people are slowly waking up to the fact the schooling system throughout the world is geared for producing hierarchical droids trained to not use their full brains.
See this TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson (writer) . While the content is good, the delivery is typically charming,exhilarating British wit.
Slava has taken up cudgels on this behalf in this post here
Kathy Sierra's "how to kick ass" is more of an instruction guide on the matter.

Remember , first thing, the act of doing something is much more important than whether it will be judged right or wrong.

William Gibson said that the future is already here but it's not distributed evenly.

mug,gun and lamp

Boat, formerly used on Styx, now on e-bay

Bureaucracy-man, our new super-hero

seneca is coffee for the mind/soul/happiness-agent

read 'Stoicism 101' on Timothy Ferriss' blog

Raywarriors

hold your sword tightly

dancers

i didn't catch what blondie said

yet one more

one more

hilarious video

had to laugh out loud.
Kill Bill in a minute