neal stephenson - white-collar-ising blue-collar-istics

for gumption and recharge, see Illuminated Thread

fear and greed are the twin engines that drive masses of humanity
if necessity is the mother of invention, laziness must be it's father, or atleast the milkman, or a travelling salesman ...


plants are the only guys who manage to live OFF the land - i mean, on JUST water and CO2 !!
that's a super-power, seriously !!

rediscovering Kathy Sierra's lectures. It began with a talk titled 'how to kick ass' on itconversations.com, cooupled with a blog post on moserware.com titled 'how to become a grandmaster' - both touched on similiar themes and had good information ,the second one more technically so, but h2ka stayed on in the mind because, well , I really care about kicking ass.
That was and is Kathy's argument - talk to the brain, not the mind - http://i.imgur.com/3iZ0k.png (in case the link doesnt work, this is a side by side comparison of brain sizes - fish/amphibian/reptile/mammal (ps: does a fish have NO VOLUNTARY actions at all ?)) - this picture might help - the large brain thinggy you see is the mammalian brain - the neocortex is a small peanut sitting on top of this. the neocortex is reponsible for 'logic' and 'reason', but the LARGE mammalian brain is responsible for keeping you clicking away on reddit.
Agreed, the we need to submit to the peanut one day, but the big one is what will drive us there, nor not at all.

recently watched a video on youtube - kathy sierra - keynote - 2009 nmc conference. Pretty impressive. then later realized her material is all there on her blog - headrush.typepad.com

reddit paid off with this link today -
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kin8p/iama_person_who_beat_my_depression_by_moving_7000/
while you notice this is in the pattern of campbell's 'hero's journey', the 'hero's journey' is probably not so exotic -we see it in everyday events ...
this passage from the link proved very very enlightening -
==
[–]DDme 19 points20 points21 points 13 hours ago

Honestly, people like to get all psychologist on you about this and say "oh but it'll come back yaddayadda."

We need to acknowledge that we have evolved inside a more intense lifestyle. We were made for tribalism, competition, interaction, challenge, and a life span of up to 40 years. Our chemical biology isn't going to be all that content with 12 hours of reddit every day and menial office work. We have to deal with irrelevant crap inside fractured and unsteady social groups, where our peers are seemingly everybody and nobody.

Clinical depression isn't such a clear thing. Some people spiral into depression just because things are too easy, and they need more challenge and purpose, they may not realise it yet; but for gods sake this doesn't call for medication. Depression to me is waking up in the morning and staring into space, everything I want to fight for is removed from my reach, I have no legitimate identity and no feeling of authenticity. 20 press-ups later and hey presto I am back, it's time for action.

I think you will be fine if you keep your future full of challenges and people who are positive about you, and above all, people that you respect.

==
note - ".. a more intense lifestyle. We were made for tribalism, competition, interaction, challenge, a .. "

http://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20Society
this guy talks about how and why we fragment into subcultures in order to find meaning..

fight club keeps talking about how the current generation american's greatest depression is their lives -
yep , it all makes sense

from 'art of manliness'

“Recovering the self must, as a sine qua non, include the recovery of the ability to have and to cognize these inner signals, to know what and whom one likes and dislikes, what is enjoyable and what is not, when to eat and when not to, when to sleep, when to urinate, when to rest. The experientially empty person, lacking these directive from within, these voices of the real self, must turn to outer cues for guidance, for instance eating when the clock tells him to, rather than obeying his appetite…He guides himself by clocks, rules, calendars, schedules, agendas, and by hints and cues from other people.”
- Maslow

also, shining your shoes is a kind of meditation, they say


==
purposeless on purpose, the paradoxical way to win

==
a lot of life's neuroses arise from putting analysis of the event before the event has happened
==
reading asimov's Foundation. it's not so much science fiction as political history ...

surfing alone
this too
robot nation
double morton - stupidity

megadeth has a song about the disintegrators. It goes something like "The slayer's arrived On a black horse of steel Trouble is coming Hell on two wheels Hide in... " bla bla bla
and all that. However, it's the integrators we should've been worried about . If only someone'd listen to toffler.

“Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”

you should've told me earlier !!!

hoo fuchin ha

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8m7lFQ3njk

this is blowing my mind. soothing. pieces falling into place.
chunks. same as primordial thoughts.thinking with both is similiar.
//atoms ,primitives - same as defun defined operators. ha !
whee !!

'please' is a category. category doesn't need to be visual things like 'shoe' or 'car'.

reset

in Microserfs, Karla advocates the theory that muscles holds the body's memories, and hence massage releases them etc etc.
I agree. I'm thinking a slow warm-up followed by stretching of muscles - section by section - accompanied by and in rhythm with breathing makes brain re-aware of the whole body. I f you sit all day, the brain forgets that the body has all these muscle-bone-nerve systems...

i did this. and this too.

this is effin spot on !!!
http://tomu.imgur.com/graffiti__streetart

for i in `find . -name *.java | xargs wc -l | awk '{ print $1 }' `; do echo ===============; a=`expr $a + $i`; echo $a; done


map( lambda x : x[:-len('.xml')].lower().replace('-','_')+'_ITCase.java' ,[x.strip() for x in os.listdir('.') if x[-len('.xml'):] == '.xml' and not x == ''])


the first one's just so so. gives kloc
the second one's simple, if you format it out.

is the same as

[ j[:-len('.xml')].lower().replace('-','_')+'_ITCase.java' for j in [x.strip() for x in os.listdir('.') if x[-len('.xml'):] == '.xml' and not x == '']]

limits

there's only so long you can sit idle while your operating systems hides your work from you - click here - no you didn't click properly, now click again, i know you minimised everything, we're not going to let you un-minimise things again - click each icon once, again now. ...


death to you ,mac

they said

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
- Rudyard Kipling , in "If"

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson , "Self Reliance"

Ignore everybody - Hugh MacLeod

adventure

I remember when books used to be about adventure. Tintin goes to Tibet, the Famous Five go to Kirrin Island, the Hardy Boys go off to some mountain where they get knocked out cold by the regulation henchman, even Nancy Drew would find some haunted mansion to wander round and get locked up in... going back even further , the Rat and the Mole would go on picnics ,boating on the river, with baskets of food, and so did the three men and their dog.
Alice dropped into a magical world one boring afternoon and Rudolph Rassendyl switched places with the king of a distant land.
From the other side, there's the island where the ships built by children end up, with the ship museum on Vetrogorsk, and the magic carpet, and kvass at Arbat street...
Then there was Robinson Crusoe , and the three on Coral Island , and the Swiss family Robinson, and then there was Jim Hawkins on the Hispaniola.

Seriously, what happened ....

I read Cryptonomicon at a time when I was trapped into a socio-economic-cultural phenomenon which was drinking out my soul in great gulps. Wavelength is such an important and undocumented word..

they said

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone

this and more here

heart trust

trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
- Goethe

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Alan Watts has a whole series devoted to 'getting you out of your mind'

the reptile

what do you call the urges to eat,kill and mate ? do you call them primitive urges ?
what happens when you suppress them ?

readme !! take a hike, not a pill

hey Ken !! loooong time !! have you figured out R.E.M yet ? : P

Arthur Koestler

I came across Roots of coincidence in Alan Moore's V for Vendetta.
I looked up Lotus and the Robot and wangled a second hand copy from Amazon.
Great book.

For we live in a state of cultural osmosis....has become irresistible. What makes it irresistible are the new media of mass communication ;and what makes the emerging pattern so vulgar is the emergence of the under privileged classes with their undeveloped tastes as consumers of mass culture.The result is that inevitable levelling-down of standards to the lowest common denominator which accompanied every revolution in the past. The liquidation of slums entails a period of cultural slumming ,though only transitory one hopes.

i did this a long time ago

a path-finding algo (a* implementation) finding, well, paths in a grid.
on openprocessing.org
needs java.

cool readings to change your life

this
cracked : seven things you are doing wrong
and this
cracked : weird things that influencebad behaviour
and this

cal newport : corrupted callings

now go turn your life around ( or 90deg, as your story be)