hbr article on steve jobs. very nice. takeaways - intersection of humanities and technology,
zenlike focus, essence of the object, deep simplicity, impute

oh, the joy of an unplanned day !
 anything-can-happen-thursday ?

the universe is made of two things : atoms and opinion

as they say in the tao book - " Should you want to eliminate something, you must deliberately allow it to flourish."   - Thomas Cleary translation
becoming a master at something , you must first make all the possible mistakes you can in the area. If you were to measure yourself on the quality of your output, you would never get far. You'd be living a life of miserable longing and self-hate. Ira Glass has a famous quote +video clip about this.

this is awesome - happiness advantage


this is mindblowing - why i chose a gun

the current environment, a virtual lobotomy. performance factor
death by a thousand cuts - each one just steals a second of your life

when you are intent upon your work
and you raise your head to see
time has passed
the feeling you get is what Gibson said of his family and Atlantis -
there was something there , but it's gone now

now if you're killing time, the feeling is different

and neither is better

it's not so much a meditative state we need to get into  than to get out of our own head and to _somewhere_ else

the manual of adventure

in this age of ever increasing stratification and stultification, the only possible adventure is to de-re-form the blackboxes of your reality. And 'Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance' isayour manual.

Bill Watterson's commencement address at Kenyon is good reading.
Chimes with Alan Watts points on work as play.
Hugh Macleod's 'Ignore everybody ' complements  all this nicely
-- excerpt --
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.
To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

phaedrus caught the ghost of rationality ,and thrashed it good.
intuition. 

quotes , wittgenstein

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.


source : Brainyquote.com

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 )

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

flash of farsight

the reality of the universe is the skin of a dragon

intelligent agents , upon encountering anomalies, quickly move to negate/compromise/compensate the anomaly.
sometimes this translates to the 'i gotta tell someone about this'.
when everybody knows, the anomaly is a commonly known thing and hence no more anomalous.
that's why media works hard to de-sensitize the population so that they don't find immoral,cruel, corrupt behaviour as anomalous.

Every positive change--every jump to a higher level of energy and awareness--involves a rite of passage. Each time to ascend to a higher rung on the ladder of personal evolution, we must go through a period of discomfort, of initiation. I have never found an exception.
- Dan Millman

same guy who said 'paradox,humor, change'

today's haul


[link][excerpts]
What he will not say, since he assumes a Westerner cannot comprehend it, is that through these seeming physical privations he finds shelter for the inner man.
...
..
..
Perhaps most important of all, we in the West are finally taking to heart what the Japanese Zen monks knew in medieval times: that domestic architecture and interiors can and should fulfill a requirement in our lives that is ordinarily served by art.

-- especially that part about rooms not being human without human presence and rooms being human only with a human inside it

suggested reading - Zen culture by Thomas Hoover

essays in idleness , kenko

* the art of tao of zen of war of motorcycle maintenance *

if you will you won't
if you don't, you may
still the butterfly flutters by

i wonder if there are peanut butterflies
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good gas, i think ?
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What does "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." mean to you? (self.philosophy)
I was reading Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche and came across the famous quote, what are your
thoughts?
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Ross Ashby's Law of requisite variety.
If you fight a monster you have to 'know' the monster ,and that means knowing it's attributes and behaviour,
once you internalize such behaviour (say, being unfair, or killing someone after you promised to spare them- typical to monsters ), these behaviours lie in the arsenal of your subconscious, and thereby you run the risk of blurring the boundary between 'your' behaviours and 'monster' behaviours .
just as if you put 'your money' and 'your friend's money' in your pocket, you run the risk of dipping your hand into your pocket and using your friend's money even though he only gave it to you so that you may bring back a watermelon for him ....
the same way, if you deal with murderers and rapists for years, your brain runs the idea that 'humans are to be abused' whenever dealing with them, and at some time, without thinking, this idea might leak into your action too...

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chore wars is a great idea. we need more of these , instead of hollow checkins

there is no joy or sorrow, only varying dopamine levels