Well this is interesting

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…are the operative words here, I think. I’m not sure what philosophy she ended up adopting, but her life was both great and rather horrifying.

I’ve dealt with both depression and cancer, and my worry, of course, is that both tend to be recurring. About the only tactic I’ve come up with is just to deal with these as best as I can. Maybe I’ll succeed, maybe I won’t - for both afflictions, the worst case outcome is the same.

However, that’s the same outcome all of us will face anyway, so…

Dealing with affliction as well as possible may best be described as adopting an attitude of grace under fire. You may go down anyway, and there’s no shame in that, but you will go down fighting until you no longer have the strength. Human strength has limits, so there’s no shame in coming up against yours either.

I’ve come to the conclusion, however, that the pursuit of happiness is a delusion. The lives of even “normal, healthy” people (whoever they may be) are marked by tragedy and disappointment as well as personal triumphs and comfort: this is part of being alive. A belief in the pursuit of happiness is probably responsible for so many people assuming that unchecked consumption will achieve this goal. (Sufficiency would be a saner goal, and one that should be politically and economically achievable for everyone.)

Happiness, when it does happen, is, well… a happy accident. Perhaps an opportunity arises where you can make a difference, and you stand there grinning - “I done good today!” Perhaps you leave home with a blank mind, and it dawns on you how particularly glorious the day and the surroundings are. That’s the thing: happiness, when it happens, is the last thing on your mind. I think the prerequisite is that you have to be a bit outside of yourself to give it a place to take root.

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Call nothing thine, except thy soul.
Love not what thou art, but only what thou may become.
Do not pursue pleasure, for thou might have the misfortune of overtaking it.
Look always forward: in last year’s nests, there are no birds this year.
Be just to all men, and courteous to all women
Live life always in the vision of she for whom great deeds are done: her name is Dulcinea.
-from Man of La Mancha

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Nice!

I think “contentment” or “engaged” is a better goal than “happiness.” A life that works; happiness is a side benefit. I don’t think it’s possible to be happy for more than a limited amount of time anyway.

Humor helps.

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This seems apposite…

Alborada del Gracioso

June 15, 2011 at 6:01 PM

(How Don Quixote might have sung of himself to Dulcinea)

for Vicki

“ Ecco Aurora con se aurata fronte…"

Giovanni Gabrieli

When first I laid eyes on you,
you were standing, as you do now,
on your balcony, framed by the rising sun
- yes, standing there in its very heart -
and I saw that, as a painting will overshadow its frame,
so too did you outshine the sun itself.

I, whose limbs the winter’s frost had stiffened,
I was rejuvenated in that light,
and, like an old tree at a spring day’s dawn,
felt the sap rise in me again and quicken,
and I blossomed
- yes, I blossomed -
and I knew that, old and gnarled as I was,
I too could bear fruit.

Now,
do you blame me that I would wish to share that fruit with you,
its “onliest begetter”?

Dreams and purposes I had thought lost forever
I have found again,
found alive and growing, branching out to reach heights
I had not thought possible
- yes, even to where you stand in the heart of the sun -
and I know that, with you for my lady,
I will accomplish great deeds.

My friends laugh at me:
they ask me how I will keep my feet
with my eyes fixed on the heavens.
- But how will I see my goal
if I stare at the ground?

They do not understand what I see in you:
they tell me all cats look alike at night.
- But it was dawn when first I saw you,
and I was most assuredly not seeking cats!

Common trash they call you,
certainly nothing to inspire thoughts of a golden age
that is not, never was, and never will be.
- But were we not all born equal
in the eyes of the Lord?

Why, then you must be a lady,
the equal of any to the manor born,
and, were there never such thing as a golden age,
should we not aspire to seek it
in our dreams, our hearts and our souls?
Even in this age of brass
- yes, even in this age of veriest brass -
I know that, with you by my side,
I shall forge its beginnings.

But,
should I seem not to know you when we pass on the street,
do not laugh.

No, call me not mad
should you see me standing transfixed by a vision,
nor fool should I stumble:
it is just that,
one morning as I stopped to watch the sun rise,
I saw my salvation standing there in its heart,
- yes, there in its very heart -
and was blinded.

Quartier du Village, Pointe-Claire, ca. April 1986

Revised: Ottawa, July 2006

© 2006 P. I. Ross-Ross

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Thread:

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I suppose Dan O’Bannon got some of the Alien ideas from moray eels, with their second set of jaws. Eek.

Fabulous thread!

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Just came up from that rabbit hole… I am now a POD person, and am quite happy about it.

I see this as an awesome opportunity to learn more about node.js. Okay, in my case, anything about node.js.

I haven’t really had time to soak in this yet, but I can see how this really would be a radical restructuring. Ethics would still be a concern, though, as will hacking.

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I’m not sure I completely get it. My understanding is that I would have my personal instances of applications like gmail, calendar, Facebook, Imgur, Twitter, etc., within my POD. I assume my POD can then communicate with other people’s PODs whom I’ve invited – it’s just there’s no central Facebook to fuck us hold the data for us. Is this one way to explain it? Is our data on our own machines or distributed across millions of computers?

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As I currently understand it from an hour of mucking about:

Your data lives in the POD. You control how much or how little of that data is publicly available.

The data (this is the part I’m really still wrapping my head around) is in a format which is generic enough that lots of different apps can access, arrange, and handle it in lots of different ways. So, for example, just because you were using one calendar app for a while does not tie you to that app forever – the next calendar app will be able to read your data just as well.

You pick the apps you want to use to handle your data, including sharing that data with other people. That includes anything from photo albums to meeting invitations to song collections.

In other words, they just removed the reason for Gmail, Facebook, Imgur, Twitter et al to even exist. Even if someone were to implement, say, a Twitter-like thing in a POD app, there would be no central “Twitter” space where all the tweets were recorded. It would be more like an RSS aggregator.

This means apps would be a lot more… porous as well. So for instance, I might use an off-the-shelf app for something, but have fun with the CSS to give it the colours and fonts I want.

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Thanks – I’ll keep my eye out for more info as it becomes available – layman’s understandable info that is.

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I don’t fully get it either, but if anyone could reinvent the Internet, it’d be the guy who pretty much made it accessible in the first place.

And it sounds interesting.

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Something to check out this Monday. A Mars probe is landing with a drill to get under the surface as explained in this comic.

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image

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As a kid in school our science teacher was telling us about how scientists were learning about the earth by trying to drill down through the crust to the mantle. I asked how they knew it wouldn’t pop like a balloon. That was one of many strange looks I got from a teacher while she tried to think of an answer. :joy:

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An interesting reexamination of Blackbeard and the pirates of the age. Maybe this is known by people who’ve studied this but news to me.

Their motives may have been mixed, but popular opinion was on the pirates’ side. Authorities regularly complained to their superiors in London that many of their subjects regarded the pirates as heroes. Lt. Gov. Alexander Spotswood of Virginia fumed that his citizens had “an unaccountable inclination to favor pirates.”

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  1. earthquakes, sea-floor spreading, subduction, and the occasional asteroid would have already popped such an Earth. And there’s a big dent opposite Nix Olympus which would have popped such a Mars too.
  2. mass estimates for the Earth would be a problem. not sure whether they would be impossible. also for Mars.
  3. seismography would not detect s-waves moving in the upper mantle if it wasn’t reasonably solid.
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  1. Air tends not to have magnetic field.
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This is from 2011, but still very interesting. This is an address to the California Academy of Sciences, where Sapolsky was/is a Fellow.

The real money quote to me, and the reason this talk stuck with me, comes in the answer to the very last question, at 1:14:40. Dr. Sapolsky is asked about the differences in human and chimp genomes now that we’ve sequenced them both.

Where are the genes that are relevant to the brain? And it turns out, there are hardly any. And the few that have been identified make perfect sense. Because these are not genes that make it possible for us to have metaphor, or genes - because going back to that first slide, we’ve got the same nervous system basically that chimps do, there’s only one difference, we’ve got like three times as many neurons – and what the genetic differences are, are genes having to do with the number of rounds of cell division during fetal brain development. Essentially what that says is, take a chimp brain fetally and let it go two or three more rounds of division, and you get a human brain instead, and out come symphonies and ideology and hop-scotch and everything else there. What that tells you is, with enough quantity you invent quality. It’s just sheer numbers, and out of that emerges in this non-linear, non-reductive way, all this stuff that makes us human. What those genes are about is producing a brain, a human brain, of a certain sort of level of qualities, but it has nothing to do with what particular qualities there are.

Stanford posted all 25 or so of his lectures from a class he taught there (except the lecture on religiosity, Stanford wimped out on that one) and they’re all worth hearing IMO.

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