froogy

2012-02-07T08:17:00.000-05:00

this is awesome - happiness advantage

this is mindblowing - why i chose a gun

2012-01-26T12:24:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-24T03:50:00.001-05:00

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

2012-01-22T05:47:00.001-05:00

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

2012-01-05T23:26:00.000-05:00

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.

2012-01-01T03:56:00.004-05:00

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.

2011-12-25T01:03:00.002-05:00

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

quotes , wittgenstein

2011-12-12T00:53:00.002-05:00

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

2011-11-14T00:30:00.006-05:00

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 )

2011-11-04T07:15:00.002-05:00

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

flash of farsight

2011-11-01T06:20:00.000-05:00

the reality of the universe is the skin of a dragon

2011-10-28T04:10:00.002-05:00

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.

2011-10-27T09:02:00.001-05:00

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'

2011-10-25T03:05:00.003-05:00

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

2011-10-24T02:04:00.005-05:00

* 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
------------------------------
good gas, i think ?
------------------------
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?
----------------------
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...

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

2011-10-11T04:44:00.000-05:00

there is no joy or sorrow, only varying dopamine levels

2011-09-29T01:06:00.001-05:00

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

2011-09-26T08:24:00.000-05:00

for gumption and recharge, see Illuminated Thread

2011-09-23T00:09:00.002-05:00

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 !!

2011-09-18T01:34:00.003-05:00

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'

2011-09-13T07:50:00.002-05:00

“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 ...

2011-09-06T00:51:00.004-05:00

surfing alone
this too
robot nation
double morton - stupidity

2011-09-04T05:42:00.002-05:00

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.

2011-08-31T02:46:00.000-05:00

“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

2011-08-10T09:42:00.005-05:00

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

2011-08-09T23:31:00.002-05:00

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.

2011-08-01T03:39:00.003-05:00

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

2011-07-29T00:53:00.002-05:00

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

2011-07-17T23:54:00.002-05:00

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

2011-06-19T05:44:00.006-05:00

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

2011-06-10T05:26:00.000-05:00

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

2011-06-01T00:02:00.002-05:00

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

2011-04-29T03:12:00.002-05:00

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

2011-04-22T03:07:00.002-05:00

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

2011-04-21T12:55:00.001-05:00

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

cool readings to change your life

2011-04-08T02:35:00.001-05:00

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)

gibson

2011-03-20T00:25:00.000-05:00

walking around brigade road re-affirms gibson

to return to the source

2011-03-17T01:49:00.002-05:00

to connect to True Emptiness
court boredom, and have it sit on your shoulder
like an unsuspecting butterfly

enlightenment

2011-02-28T03:26:00.000-05:00

from the onion

title

2011-02-23T04:30:00.003-05:00

you do not build a palace by building a hundred different rooms in hundred different places.

i made this

2011-02-18T12:39:00.001-05:00

hello world. iam here. sitting in this box

connections

2011-01-18T02:18:00.002-05:00

1)
Probably no one would ever know this; it did not matter. In the 1980s, Minsky and Good had shown how neural networks could be generated automatically—self replicated—in accordance with any arbitrary learning program. Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of a human brain. In any given case, the precise details would never be known, and even if they were, they would be millions of times too complex for human understanding.

—Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey[8]

2)
Rick Hanson says you can change your mind to change your brain which in turn can change your mind.
" ... when your mind changes, your brain changes -- both temporarily, with the momentary flicker of synaptic activity, and in lasting ways through formation of new neural structures. Therefore, you can use your mind to change your brain to benefit your whole being -- and every other being whose life you touch."

Control over consciousness

2011-01-08T00:45:00.004-05:00

Control of consciousness determines quality of life.
from Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

"The last great attempt to free consciousness from the domination of impulses and social controls was psychoanalysis; as Freud pointed out , the two tyrants that fought for control over the mind were the id and the superego , the first a servant of the genes, the second a lackey of society, both representing the "Other". Opposed to them was the ego, which stood for the geniuine needs of the self connected to its concrete environment."

- a middle path ?!? could it be ... !!??!!

"... the intended result is identical: to free inner life from the threat of chaos, on the one hand, and from rigid conditioning of biological urges on the other, and hence to become independent from the social controls that exploit both"

a-ha !
remember - games people play - spontaneity ?

"Control over consciousness cannot be instituitonalized. As soon as it becomes part of a set of social rules and norms, it ceases to be effective in the way it was originally intended to be. Routinization, unfortunately, takes place very rapidly.Freud was still alive when his quest for liberating the ego from its oppressors was turned into a staid ideology and rigidly regulated profession"

cross-reference:
1. DeLanda /Erik Davis interview - stratification and destratification
[internally c/r deleuze&guattari]
2. Tao Te Ching - the tao that can be told is not the eternal tao
[because the tao that can be told gets institutionalized]
3. Zen - a transmission beyond scriptures
4. Buddha - decay is inherent in all compounded things. strive unceasingly
This makes more sense. It frames 'Against History,Against Leviathan' in a clearer light too.

one more piece :
"If one has failed to develop curiosity and interest in the early years, it is a good idea to acquire them now, before it is too late to improve the quality of life.
To do so is fairly easy in principle, but more difficult in practice. Yet it is sure worth trying. The first step is to develop the habit of doing whatever needs to be done with concentrated attention, with skill rather than inertia. Even the most routine tasks, like washing dishes, dressing, or mowing the lawn become more rewarding if we approach them with the care it would take to make a work of art."

cr alan watts work as play

digest 4-1-11

2011-01-03T23:27:00.012-05:00

In the news today, mattmaroon feels that google will become an AI company. He goes on to list his (day)dreams and frankly, I like them.
Mainly , driverless cars - we already have those , but not yet in a large institutionalised way. This means lots of time for yourself, distance doesn't matter as automated cars can go fast coz every other car on the road has a robot driver which follows the rules. you can get your kids cars because they are not driving, you can get drunk all the time because your car's like a taxi now.... nice. Something like this needs a giant amount of influence - it's not just money, you need laws to work for you. This should keep the auto lobby busy.

Duckduckgo has a site up explaining how your sexual problems and financial woes, as entered in the google search box become visible to people who you want to hide them from. Also, a tall lanky google engineer used search data to snoop on four minors whom he met. Differently, another google engineer got a teenager out of jail. The kid was arrested for filming a cop beating up a teen.
An interesting link that showed up is this : a test that can spot a single stray cancer cell in a BILLION may be available at your doctor's soon. It's from J&J. This test does 'liquid' biopsy and might do away with the long needle one. (Will HouseMD lose its charm if House's pawns aren't forced to poke patients with long long needles, sometimes twice in the same episode ... I'm thinking they'll move on to full limb amputations next to keep up the wtf )

Also, Thomas Kuhn did something important in his 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'. People say it affects how you/we think.

The zenhabits guy lists the top 2 habits of creatives - 1. constructive solitude 2. participation(?)

George Orwell calls Indian tea as 'feels wiser braver and more optimistic after drinking it'
read more here

Things we laugh at:
1. misplacement : a zebra in a doctor's coat
2. schadenfraude : bad things that happen to others and that we feel won't happen to us
3. absurdity,stretching of reality beyond bounds : superset of misplacement

More as the lone reporter in our office surfs at work.

on music

2011-01-03T01:13:00.001-05:00

i think listening to moby naturally progresses to massive attack .

the best

2010-12-17T03:29:00.001-05:00

'remixed' alan watts video. is super awesome. the best !

out there, someone is waking up earlier than you

2010-12-10T08:25:00.001-05:00

motivation video

overcome noise

2010-12-09T01:35:00.003-05:00

yes !
link
this article came ditto in a long back Reader's Digest, when it was a good periodical

excerpt:
• Practice, practice. Does mental focus develop the part of the brain used in the task, just as physical exercise builds up the muscles? Psychology professor Michael Posner of the University of Oregon used PET scans and electroencephal-ograms to trace the brain activity of people focused on given tasks. Trying a task for the first time increased blood flow and electrical activity in the brain. But as the subjects became accomplished, brain blood flow and electrical discharges decreased. The more we practice concentration, Posner believes, the less brain activity is necessary. And mental skills perfected in one area can be transferred to others.

“The key,” says Louis Csoka, who taught concentration to future battlefield commanders at West Point, “is to learn to overcome noise’ and interference, whether internal or external.” For example, if you’re a Jazz lover, you might practice by turning on some music and listening only to the alto saxophone, blocking out all the other instruments or vocals. If you’re a football fan, practice by looking at only the left outside linebacker.

more interesting

2010-11-29T10:33:00.001-05:00

rejection for success

candy. so much candy. I could nibble all day

2010-11-29T01:06:00.003-05:00

which reminds me, I have dentist appointment at 6.30
by tomorrow, two of my good companions will be gone. Or join one more of their number in my desk-drawer in a small ziploc.

30 interesting brain facts

why I love Gibson

2010-11-28T01:56:00.002-05:00

"Nanofax?"

"Everything the name implies," says Klaus, "and considerably less."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nanofax AG offers a technology that digitally reproduces objects, physically, at a distance. Within certain rather large limitations, of course. A child's doll, placed in a Lucky Dragon Nanofax unit in London, will be reproduced in the Lucky Dragon Nanofax unit in New York-"

"How?"

'With assemblers, out of whatever's available. But the system's been placed under severe legal constraints. It can't, for instance, reproduce functional hardware. And of course it can't, most particularly can't, reproduce functional nanoassemblers."

"I thought that they'd proven that didn't work anyway," Laney says.

"Oh no," says the Rooster, "they just don't want it to."

--- from All Tomorrow's Parties

Stereolithography is coming true

getting better

2010-11-27T23:28:00.004-05:00

is about taking a rock and growing that
into a tower

sometimes you get a lighthouse

wunderwaffe

2010-11-27T00:48:00.000-05:00

german ww2 tech was better

how to get hit by a car like a boss

2010-11-24T23:50:00.001-05:00

this is awesome cool

http://i.imgur.com/va2RE.gif

there is no way to happiness

2010-11-22T04:54:00.001-05:00

happiness is the way

meditation heals

2010-11-22T02:51:00.001-05:00

, works at gene level
see link
also, rick hansen's talks on youtube

caffeine

2010-11-15T11:10:00.001-05:00

Caffeine amplifies your stress levels

and this is enlightening : how retail commerce tricks and cons you every possible way

education and learning

2010-11-14T07:35:00.003-05:00

education is knowing nature's ways
learning is memorizing other men's works
update :
there's symbol mapping, symbolic manipulation in itself (math/philosophy etc),
and otherwise , memory replay, extrapolation of mental video, audio ?

did you think it could be simply captured in words like "education" and "learning" ?

economics of seinfeld

2010-11-14T01:45:00.001-05:00

seinfeld economics

i love it !!
i can still remember elaine shouting "you're all crazy" to a restaurant full of people eating candy bars with a knife and fork

should not we be

2010-11-09T23:16:00.001-05:00

eating mnore of this - bran rice/rice bran

what happens when you drink a coke : it's like a horror movie

2010-11-09T23:04:00.000-05:00

original article here

1. In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down.
2. 20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get it’s hands on into fat. (There’s plenty of that at this particular moment)
3. 40 minutes: Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dialate, your blood pressure rises, as a response your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked preventing drowsiness.
4. 45 minutes: Your body ups your dopamine production stimulating the pleasure centers of your brain. This is physically the same way heroin works, by the way.
5. 60 minutes: The phosphoric acid binds calcium, magnesium and zinc in your lower intestine, providing a further boost in metabolism. This is compounded by high doses of sugar and artificial sweeteners also increasing the urinary excretion of calcium.
6. 60 minutes: The caffeine’s diuretic properties come into play. (It makes you have to pee.) It is now assured that you’ll evacuate the bonded calcium, magnesium and zinc that was headed to your bones as well as sodium, electrolyte and water.
7. 60 minutes: As the rave inside of you dies down you’ll start to have a sugar crash. You may become irritable and/or sluggish. You’ve also now, literally, pissed away all the water that was in the Coke. But not before infusing it with valuable nutrients your body could have used for things like even having the ability to hydrate your system or build strong bones and teeth.

going viral

2010-11-08T07:42:00.003-05:00

game theory experiemnt on going viral

loosely coupled, lack of perfect information = good for adoption

major hubs of adoption = more clear information = less of new meme-ing

in other words Gibson's Cody Harwood was on the dot about letting sub-cultures evolve, seemingly spin away and then going in and main-streaming them.like zion.

claire danes in stardust

2010-11-07T11:31:00.002-05:00

has no eyebrows.
if i look at her face long enough, i become overcome by a sense of revulsion, which is unfortunate as the whole look that she has gooing is anything but

i mean, if i were in a magical adventure , i'd love it if she showed up in it (with eyebrows) ..

from "The Forbidden Kingdom"

2010-11-07T02:15:00.003-05:00

--------------------------------------------------
Kung Fu...
Hard work over time to accomplish skill.
A painter can have kung fu.
Or the butcher, who cuts meat everyday with such a skill that his knife never touches the board.

Learn the form, seek the formless.
Hear the soundless.
Learn it all, and forget it all.
Learn the way, and then find your own way.
The musician can have kung fu, or the poet, who paints pictures with words and makes emperors weep. This too is kung fu.
But do not name it, my friend. For it is like water.
Nothing is softer than water, yet it can overcome rock.
It does not fight, it flows along the opponent.
Formless, nameless. A true master dwells within.
Only you can free him.
--------------------------------------------------
Wanted this down somewhere.

I like Munnabhai MBBS

2010-11-06T04:24:00.002-05:00

Munna bhai mbbs is a superb movie.
The cast brilliantly turns the borderline stupid script in the Hindi version into real gold.
You've got to see Wasool Raja to see how the jokes and characters don't translate so easily into other languages

stupid

2010-11-05T12:47:00.003-05:00

- how stupid is a celebration of lights in a city where you can't see the night sky even if you wanted to ?

- how stupid is buying firecrackers priced Rs. 1920 ? what is this , a wine ?

- how stupid is that automobile exhaust is not pollution enough that we have to add sulphur,nitrates and other shit to it ? is not diabetes and b.p enough that we have to add bronchitis and red eyes to it ?

- how stupid is it that a bunch of people make large amounts of sugar laden fried dough and 'gift' it to others so that you end up eating so much sugar in a day that you would otherwise eat in a week or two ?

The date might be an auspicious one but the ways have to change

and it looks like i have to go it alone

there's something seriously wrong here

2010-11-04T09:31:00.000-05:00

http://gizmodo.com/5681152/woman-must-pay-15-million-for-illegally-downloaded-songs

new find of the day

2010-11-01T02:03:00.002-05:00

Ted Nelson
wikipedia says ...
Ted Nelson promotes four maxims: "most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong".

interesting. that's the second reference to oxlabs in two days.
since all i see the real world through reddit and hacker news, i can only conclude that there are more brits active on these sites than a while ago.

and also the lion's notebooks

the gnomes who read your newspaper

2010-10-24T11:45:00.002-05:00

three old men

2010-10-24T11:43:00.004-05:00

i just love this guy !!

2010-10-21T02:30:00.001-05:00

"While I'm on the subject of food, a few weeks ago I decided to stop eating all sweeteners, including fruit juice and even sweet fruits. Now I don't eat anything sweeter than a tomato. This has greatly increased my energy. Up on the land on Thursday I was active for ten hours straight without lying down, something that would have been impossible a month ago. But it's also like dying: of the many things that happen when you die, one of the most important is that you never again get to have waffles soaked in real maple syrup. "

on the minimalism trail

2010-10-15T03:51:00.001-05:00

i found
john maeda
muji motion

maeda also has a ted talk and a 'laws of simplicity' blog/site

connect Kathy Sierra, Alan Kay, Tim Gallwey

2010-10-15T01:34:00.002-05:00

answer
Can you connect the hum to the Indian sloka tradition ?
Alan Kay is a gold mine.
Tim Gallwey is a Bankei

recipe for enjoying junk food

2010-10-13T09:32:00.004-05:00

slice nicely some cabbage,a green pepper and an onion
add a pinch of turmeric and a dash of water
microwave for two minutes

add one sliced tomato
and put liberally raw-garlic-and-green-chillies-and-dates-in-vinegar pickle

yogurt/curd for base
sprinkle a pinch of Devil's Dung in remembrance of the Greeks who ate meat raw with its help

stir,enjoy.

The taste of any fried breaded items consumed after this will go up four-fold,guaranteed.

ps: also - you can add black kadalai or chickpeas or potato or egg or spinach or dal. Now 3 out of the above are for protein ,one for carbs and one for general health magic and iron. mix accordingly

two or three

2010-10-11T07:58:00.002-05:00

If you say "there are 2 types of people, those who do X and those who don't do X",
then you have actually split the world into 3 types of people - those who do X, those who don't do X, and those who don't fall into this dichotomy.

Also :
"When making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich you must first apply the peanut butter, not the jelly to the bottom half of the bread."

a treasure is found

2010-10-11T04:49:00.001-05:00

learn my children learn

schopenhauer, of course

to be rich you need to stop acting like it

2010-10-10T23:38:00.000-05:00

article here

* 86% of all luxury vehicles are driven by people who are not millionaires.

* $16 what most millionaires pay for a haircut (including tip)

now this is REAL scary

2010-10-10T11:36:00.002-05:00

when capitalism gets its hands on the world's water ...
goodbye dignified living..

approxadamus

2010-10-10T10:08:00.002-05:00

an approxadamus is a semi-gifted individual who is able to predict the future, with a slight inaccuracy.
To illustrate, while Nostradamus might say - "One-eyed, red-haired, white, hoary-headed will hold the course" and no one would have a clue, except maybe the crossword fanatics (and nobody cares about them ), and the approxadamus might say "I am going to fall down the stairs tomorrow" when what might actually happen is that the stairs near the approxadamus's residence collapse all by themselves with none hurt in the process.
Approx. adamus.

quote/aristotle

2010-10-08T04:59:00.000-05:00

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
- Aristotle

new gold

2010-10-07T09:26:00.000-05:00

programmable devices are the new gold

swing softer cut harder

2010-10-07T08:35:00.002-05:00

it's quiet at the centre of a tornado
deny and harness

doug rushkoff new book/video

2010-10-07T08:27:00.001-05:00

video on youtube

interesting points, those who program, can define reality for the rest, inclusive of but not limited to governments,economy,education,even religion

this is where i got to

2010-10-07T01:22:00.002-05:00

hard and soft addiction

2010-10-07T01:12:00.002-05:00

Addiction agents can come to your brain past the blood brain barrier, or they can sneak in within the regular channel traffic from the senses.

black-box-ing

2010-10-06T09:58:00.004-05:00

"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)

Aha !

Once we have made a blackbox if a particular piece of reality, we are no longer equipped to deal with any event from _within_ the blackbox.
As we age,the ability to open a blackbox and reconcile its contents with other blackboxes ,decreases.
Examples will come as I can think of them

in the temple many calculations were made

2010-10-06T09:33:00.007-05:00

I need a place to retreat to every once in a while. Some people run, and in there is their 'thinking' time. It's the workout for others.
In this city life, it is impossible to retreat without physical exertion.

In Yoga, you go from "I can bend a little" to "I can bend a lot" after ,say, two-three hundred repetitions. You start within your limits and stretch, both physically and metaphorically, a little more every day, painlessly.

In Zen meditation, you sit in a place and don't move for so long that the mind decides that the body is no longer part of it, and floats away. To get to this stage, you sit through pain, whenever it arises. It is _past_ the pain that anything worthy lies.

And an interesting post tying to the previous one . I'd have said "no" cos of the dopamine spikes..

now, a link says writing by hand improves the brain.

and in case you tend to think less of the GM diet, remember that it was tested in John Hopkins U

dopamine spikes ,porn addiction, triune brain

2010-10-06T09:26:00.004-05:00

benefits of getting de-addicted.from alternet

"Often they report dramatic changes as porn use recedes: more energy, increased social confidence, better concentration, greater gains from workouts, stronger erections, a return to earlier sexual tastes, increased optimism, and more enjoyment from life’s subtler pleasures."

Porn's chief danger .. "arises from intense stimulation of the reward circuitry of the brain -- a portion of the ancient “mammalian brain,” which lies under the newer neocortex (rational brain). The reward circuitry governs emotions, mating, eating, motivation, and all addictions. It runs on a neurochemical called dopamine, the “gotta get it!” neurotransmitter."

The brain develops immunity to dopamine levels, like any with drug/ sugar/ chocolate/ cigarette/etc addiction, and you need to up your dose dose every once in a while. Which leads to your brain getting numb to life's smaller pleasures.

On a discordant note, Brad Warner says sex is fine in Buddhism.
He also says: - Buddhism is not spirituality. There are idealists and materialists.
Inte-hresting.

Rudyard Kipling said "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same ". Maybe he was talking about dopamine here.

In case you forgot, the Triune brain concept is that our brain is composed of three parts- 1. the reptilian brain-stem 2. the giant mammalian brain and 3. the neocortex.
the mammalian brain is responsible for the warm fuzzy stuff.

Mitchell Kapor of Lotus 1-2-3

2010-10-05T01:26:00.002-05:00

Wikipedia says :
. He received a BA from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary major in Cybernetics.

Psychology, computer science and linguistics as part of Cybernetics.

Wow.

3 october

2010-10-03T03:48:00.001-05:00

puzzle drive
tinyeye
coolhunter
industry watcher
tree builder

Essay by Isaac Asimov

2010-09-30T07:19:00.002-05:00

http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html

Right and Wrong in Schroedinger's box and shaken.

excerpt:
"It is the mark of the marvelous toleration of the Athenians that they let this continue for decades and that it wasn't till Socrates turned seventy that they broke down and forced him to drink poison."

yesterday and tomorrow

2010-09-24T23:14:00.002-05:00

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

2010-09-20T02:45:00.002-05:00

The economist article
says do not corporatize fun.

Book and quote, lewis thomas and Zorg

2010-09-19T06:41:00.004-05:00

"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

2010-09-16T10:30:00.002-05:00

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

transcending abstractions

2010-09-08T03:15:00.001-05:00

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

2010-08-30T03:09:00.004-05:00

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 !!

2010-08-27T04:08:00.002-05:00

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

2010-08-12T01:24:00.003-05:00

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

2010-08-07T09:42:00.002-05:00

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

***