Quote of the Day

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.

- Albert Camus

Wisdom Of The Week

Tyler Cowen in his Econtalk interview refutes Andy Matuschak's claim on Books and Learning:

Russ Roberts: I recently had Andy Matuschak on the program. It hasn't aired yet, so you have definitely not heard it. But, he argues that books are extremely inefficient ways to convey information. And, one of the ways he, one of the points he makes, is that, if you think of a nonfiction book that you read a year or two ago, maybe even 6 weeks ago, you will struggle to remember anything about it. You might remember what it's about. You might remember one or two things about it. And that would be true of a lecture as well as a book. In fact, with lectures, I would say you mostly remember--if you are lucky--the topic, months later. He thinks those are very inefficient ways of conveying information. And he describes them as--it's not his term, but I think it's someone else's--but it's 'transmissionism'--I tell you a bunch of stuff, hoping you'll absorb it. What are your thoughts on that?

Tyler Cowen: I think Andy is a brilliant guy. I'm supporting him through a charitable project I'm running called Emergent Ventures. But I don't completely agree with him on that, necessarily. So, you don't remember much from a book, but maybe you remember what you need to. And then you are then clearing the space for the next thing. And the fact that books don't exercise such a tyranny over your mind maybe is what allows you to keep on reading them. So, if a book was something that really just seized control of your mind, like, say, LSD [Lysergic acid Diethylamide] does, people would be afraid of books.

Russ Roberts: Hng, heh, heh, heh.

Tyler Cowen: So, maybe having a somewhat superficial relationship with books is how it ought to be.

Russ Roberts: I've read books like that, by the way--that take control of your mind. That you fall in love with. That you become obsessed with. Right? And that you maybe over-absorb.

Tyler Cowen: Yes. It happens more often when you are young, I think, than when you are old.

Quote of the Day

If you don't feel that you haven't read enough you haven't read enough.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Quote of the Day

Well, I don’t know about you, but I feel a little better than I did when I started. The hell with fascism. The hell with bigotry and paranoia. The hell with fools falling for the lies of charlatans; that’s what fools do. We’re just going to keep on doing what we do: Making and consuming art. Supporting the people who remind us that we are in this together. We are each only one poem, one painting, one song away from another mind, another heart. It’s tragic that we need so much reminding. And yet we have, in art, the power to keep reminding each other.

- Michael Chabon on What's the point of Art?

Quote of the Day

What would have become of Hercules do you think if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar — and no savage criminals to rid the world of? What would he have done in the absence of such challenges?

Obviously he would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep. So by snoring his life away in luxury and comfort he never would have developed into the mighty Hercules.

And even if he had, what good would it have done him? What would have been the use of those arms, that physique, and that noble soul, without crises or conditions to stir into him action?

- Epictetus, The Discourses

Quote of the Day

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

- Albert Camus

Quote of the Day

The ignorance that knows itself, judges and condemns itself, is not an absolute ignorance. … Is it not better to remain in suspense than to entangle one’s self in the innumerable errors that human fancy has produced? Is it not much better to suspend one’s persuasion than to intermeddle with these wrangling and seditious divisions?

- Michel de Montaigne

Quote of the Day

Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we are not able to refute.

- Michel de Montaigne

Quote of the Day

What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walking

Wisdom Of The Week

I have never heard someone summarize the different types of messages/purposes we infer from reading different types of books; that would be the only and only, Russ Roberts during his interview with Andy Matuschak on Books and Learning:

Andy Matuschak: Wonderful. So, I guess, first off, some of those 112 details are somewhat less spitback. But I think the really important thing is what those 112 details let you think next. My colleague has this metaphor that I really enjoy, so I'll share it here. Reading a challenging technical textbook is often a little bit like beginning by reading a book in English, and then--let's assume you don't know Spanish--Spanish words start creeping in. And by the time you finish the first chapter, like everything is in Spanish. And you turn to the second chapter, and you're like, 'Whoa. Like, I thought I'd picked up a book off the English section. What happened?' And so, you're going to struggle with that second chapter. If you have those 112 details, which[?] we have a second chapter, you are going to have a lot easier time learning about the quantum search algorithm.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. But that's--Let me take you to a harder example. I'm going to give you two. Just for fun. Because they are both former EconTalk guests. So, I interviewed Yuval Harari a while back about his first book, which is Sapiens. My wife is reading it now. And, let's pretend you ask me: What do you remember about Sapiens? Which my wife taps into a little bit because we are talking about it. And it turns out we are remembering three things. Three things! Not good. It's a long book. I remember that he thinks that agriculture was a mistake and I didn't agree with him; it didn't sit well with me. I remember that his view of money is based on trust and I thought, took that idea a little too far even though there is a sense on which money is based on trust. As an economist I found that a little simplistic. And third, he's anti-religion. Those are the--that's the three things I remember. That's weird! That's depressing. Now, let me take a different book: Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Taleb. Now, when that book came out--I read it--didn't write when it came out. I read it somewhat after, The Black Swan, his second book came out. And there were two views of that book, which I've mentioned here before. One view was: 'There is nothing original in this book. This guy is a fraud. He pretends he has figured out all this stuff.' And I said, 'You know, I agree with that. ' I didn't learn anything that I didn't know in this book before. I knew that probability is difficult. I knew that risk is a hard thing to wrap your mind around. I understand something about most of the ideas he talked about in the book. So, in some sense, I learned nothing. On the other hand, I learned something incredibly deep. That book really grabbed me by the guts and jerked me around. It forced me to confront some things that I "knew" but didn't really internalize. And I would put that as another category of learning. These are things that, um, I'm just going to give you another example, another EconTalk guest, A.J. Jacobs, who writes a book called Thanks, A Thousand. It's about being grateful. Being grateful is a really good idea. I already knew that before I read the book. But the book made me a little more grateful, maybe. But, even if I remember that that's idea of the book, and even if after reading, I thought, 'Yeah. I should be more grateful,' to get me to be more grateful--that's a very high level. And so, those are the sort of 3--you know, those are all nonfiction books. They are all kind of trying to convey some understanding that the author has of the world around us. And I have really, really, different grasps of all of them.

Andy Matuschak: That's wonderful. And, to some extent, it illustrates the variety of purposes for which books are intended. If we look at, classical rhetoric, only a small part of that information piece. But, if, for instance, in the second book where you were yanked around--I'm not actually sure if it was maybe ethos or pathos. It kind of could have been either depending on your predilections around Taleb. But that's something that's not going to come just from a flashcard.

Russ Roberts: Exactly.

Quote of the Day

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

- Henry David Thoreau,  Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

Quote of the Day

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

Quote of the Day

Memory represents to us not what we choose, but what she pleases; nay, there is nothing that so much imprints any thing in our memory as a desire to forget it. And ‘tis a good way to retain and keep any thing safe in the soul to solicit her to lose it.

- Michel de Montaigne

Quote of the Day

The Master made it his task to destroy systematically every doctrine, every belief, every concept of the divine, for these things, which were originally intended as pointers, were now being taken as descriptions.

He loved to quote the Eastern saying "When the sage points to the moon, all that the idiot sees is the finger."

- Anthony de Mello

Quote of the Day

It always seems impossible until it's done.

- Nelson Mandela

Dogs of Chernobyl - The Abandoned Pets That Formed Their Own Canine Community

After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, Pripyat and the surrounding villages were abandoned, and residents were not allowed to take their pets to safety. Chernobyl Prayer, a devastating oral history of the period, tells of “dogs howling, trying to get on the buses. Mongrels, alsatians. The soldiers were pushing them out again, kicking them. They ran after the buses for ages.” Heartbroken families pinned notes to their doors: “Don’t kill our Zhulka. She’s a good dog.” There was no mercy. Squads were sent in to shoot the animals. But some survived and it is mainly their descendants that populate the zone.

Life is not easy for the Chernobyl strays. Not only must they endure harsh Ukrainian winters with no proper shelter, but they often carry increased levels of radiation in their fur and have a shortened life expectancy. Few live beyond the age of six.

[---]

While the dogs get some food and play from the visitors, their health needs are met by Clean Futures Fund, a US non-profit organisation that helps communities affected by industrial accidents, which has set up three veterinary clinics in the area, including one inside the Chernobyl plant. The clinics treat emergencies and issue vaccinations against rabies, parvovirus, distemper and hepatitis. They are also neutering the dogs. Lucas Hixson, the fund’s co-founder, says: “I don’t think we’ll ever get zero dogs in the exclusion zone but we want to get the population down to a manageable size so we can feed and provide long-term care for them.” This makes Chernobyl safer for the dogs, but also for the workers and visitors.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. It's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.

- Barack Obama

Quote of the Day

Inspiration Is for Amateurs—The Rest of Us Just Show Up and Get to Work.

- Painter,  Chuck Close

Wisdom Of The Week

Simard’s inquiries confirmed that beneath her forest floor there did indeed exist what she called an “underground social network,” a “bustling community of mycorrhizal fungal species” that linked sapling to sapling. She also discovered that the hyphae made connections between species: joining not only paper birch to paper birch and Douglas fir to Douglas fir, but also fir to birch and far beyond—forming a non-hierarchical network between numerous kinds of plants.

Simard had established a structure of connection between the saplings. But the hyphae provided only the means of mutualism. Its existence did not explain why the fir saplings faltered when the birch saplings were weeded out, or details as to what—if anything—might be transmitted via this collaborative system. So Simard and her team devised an experiment that could let them track possible biochemical movements along this invisible buried lattice. They decided to inject fir trees with radioactive carbon isotopes. Using mass spectrometers and scintillation counters, they were then able to track the flow of carbon isotopes from tree to tree.

What this tracking revealed was astonishing. The carbon isotopes did not stay confined to the individual trees into which they were injected. Instead, they moved down the trees’ vascular systems to their root tips, where they passed into the fungal hyphae that wove with those tips. Once in the hyphae they traveled along the network to the root tips of another tree, where they entered the vascular system of that new tree. Along the way, the fungi drew off and metabolized some of the photosynthesized resources that were moving along their hyphae; this was their benefit from the mutualism.

Here was proof that trees could move resources around between one another using the mycorrhizal network. The isotope tracking also demonstrated the unexpected intricacy of the interrelations. In a research plot thirty meters square, every single tree was connected to the fungal system, and some trees—the oldest—were connected to as many as forty-seven others. The results also solved the puzzle of the fir–birch mutualism: the Douglas firs were receiving more photosynthetic carbon from paper birches than they were transmitting. When paper birches were weeded out, the nutrient intake of the fir saplings was thus—counterintuitively—reduced rather than increased, and so the firs weakened and died.

The fungi and the trees had “forged their duality into a oneness, thereby making a forest,” wrote Simard in a bold summary of her findings. Instead of seeing trees as individual agents competing for resources, she proposed the forest as a “cooperative system,” in which trees “talk” to one another, producing a collaborative intelligence she described as “forest wisdom.” Some older trees even “nurture” smaller trees that they recognize as their “kin,” acting as “mothers.” Seen in the light of Simard’s research, the whole vision of a forest ecology shimmered and shifted—from a fierce free market to something more like a community with a socialist system of resource redistribution.

- The Understory by Robert Macfarlane excerpts from his book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

Quote of the Day

The mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced.

- Francis Bacon

Quote of the Day

Be steady and well ordered in your life so you can be crazy and spontaneous in your work.

- David Allen: The Art of Getting Things Done on Tim Ferris Show

Quote of the Day

Much of the stress that people feel doesn't come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they've started.

- David Allen

Quote of the Day

Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution of a vegetarian diet.

- Albert Einstein,  11 Famous Vegetarians In History + What We Can Learn From Them

Quote of the Day

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.

- Paul McCartney,  11 Famous Vegetarians In History + What We Can Learn From Them

Quote of the Day

Martin Luther King taught us all nonviolence. I was told to extend nonviolence to the mother and her calf.

- Dick Gregory,  11 Famous Vegetarians In History + What We Can Learn From Them

Quote of the Day

He who knows other men is discerning;
he who knows himself is intelligent.
He who overcomes others is strong;
he who overcomes himself is mighty.
He who works hard gets wealth;
he who knows when he has enough is truly rich.

- Laozi, Tao te Ching, XXXIII, trans. Steve Thomas

The Risks of The Everyday - with Jared Diamond

The Risks of The Everyday - with Jared Diamond from The Royal Institution on Vimeo.

Wisdom Of The Week

13 years ago, I didn't follow my instincts and went with what society preached... I never felt comfortable with that decision but there is no turning back. Now, Alexandra Horowitz (Author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know) has voiced a powerful concern against the "Automatic Spay-Neuter" policy we blindly follow - Dogs Are Not Here for Our Convenience:

For by our widespread policies of desexing dogs, we are not just removing their gonads: we are changing their bodies, their health, and their behavior — not always for the better. We are implying that dogs should be asexual, in body and mind. We are altering the future of the species, to its peril.

[---]

More troubling, despite the unambiguous statements made by proponents of the salutary effects of spay-neuter on dogs, a series of long-term research programs has begun to show that the effects are far more subtle — and sometimes outright damaging. Benjamin Hart, a researcher and veterinarian at the University of California, Davis, has led the biggest effort to date to see exactly what the repercussions of desexing might be, in the long term, using the database from his university’s veterinary hospital. By removing dogs’ reproductive organs, gonadectomies also remove their main source of hormones — estrogen, testosterone and progesterone — each of which has a role not just in reproduction, but systemically through the body.

The first publication by Dr. Hart and his team, in 2013, reported that desexing golden retrievers, especially before six months of age, increased their risk of serious joint diseases, four to five times over the risk intact dogs face. They have since found higher rate of joint diseases among desexed Labrador retrievers, German shepherds, Doberman pinschers, Bernese mountain dogs and St. Bernards. Risks of cancer increase multifold in spayed goldens, neutered boxers and all Bernese. Desexed dogs of all types suffer higher rates of obesity. One of the most touted claims of spay-neuter — that it increases an animal’s life span — may be tempered by the finding that with an increased life span comes an increase rate of life-taking cancers.

[---]

We could also change the culture of ownership. In Europe, desexing has not been routine. Until recently, it was illegal to desex a dog in Norway. Only 7 percent of Swedish dogs are desexed (compared with more than 80 percent in the United States). Switzerland has a clause in its Animal Protection Act honoring the “dignity of the animal,” and forbidding any pain, suffering or harm, such as would be incurred by desexing. Yet none of these countries has a problem with excessive stray dogs.

The Norwegian dog trainer Anne-Lill Kvam told me that stray dogs are “not a problem” because “everyone takes care” of their dogs. They keep their animals close, attend to them and train them not to behave in such a way that would lead to unwanted animals. As a Norwegian animal-welfare official was quoted as saying, “Neutering can never be a substitute for proper training of a dog.”

Quote of the Day

Animals are my friends and I don’t eat my friends.

- Isaac Bashevis Singer,  11 Famous Vegetarians In History + What We Can Learn From Them

Quote of the Day

Animals are my friends and I don’t eat my friends.

- George Bernard Shaw,  11 Famous Vegetarians In History + What We Can Learn From Them

The Anthropologist of Artificial Intelligence - Machine Behavior

“I was good friends with Iain Couzin, one of the world’s foremost animal behaviorists,” Rahwan said, “and I thought, ‘Why isn’t he studying online bots? Why is it only computer scientists who are studying AI algorithms?’

“All of a sudden,” he continued, “it clicked: We’re studying behavior in a new ecosystem.”

Two years later, Rahwan, who now directs the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, has gathered 22 colleagues — from disciplines as diverse as robotics, computer science, sociology, cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, anthropology and economics — to publish a paper in Nature calling for the inauguration of a new field of science called “machine behavior.”

Directly inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen’s four questions — which analyzed animal behavior in terms of its function, mechanisms, biological development and evolutionary history — machine behavior aims to empirically investigate how artificial agents interact “in the wild” with human beings, their environments and each other. A machine behaviorist might study an AI-powered children’s toy, a news-ranking algorithm on a social media site, or a fleet of autonomous vehicles. But unlike the engineers who design and build these systems to optimize their performance according to internal specifications, a machine behaviorist observes them from the outside in — just as a field biologist studies flocking behavior in birds, or a behavioral economist observes how people save money for retirement.

“The reason why I like the term ‘behavior’ is that it emphasizes that the most important thing is the observable, rather than the unobservable, characteristics of these agents,” Rahwan said.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

To my mind the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body.

- Gandhi,  11 Famous Vegetarians In History + What We Can Learn From Them

Quote of the Day

My food is not that of man, I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford my sufficient nourishment.

- Mary Shelley,  11 Famous Vegetarians In History + What We Can Learn From Them

Quote of the Day

My food is not that of man, I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford my sufficient nourishment.

- Mary Shelley,  11 Famous Vegetarians In History + What We Can Learn From Them

Quote of the Day

My body will not be a tomb for other creatures.

- Leonardo da Vinci, 11 Famous Vegetarians In History + What We Can Learn From Them

Getting “Exhausted” T Cells Back Into Action Against Cancer

The human immune system has the power to fight off a vast array of viruses, infections and other pathogens. Yet when cancer strikes, that often isn’t enough. In some forms of the disease, tumor cells hide in plain sight, evading a patient’s T cells — parts of the immune system key to destroying pathogens. If a cancer evades them for long enough, the immune cells enter a state called “T cell exhaustion,” where those powerful defenders call off their attack, and linger in the background.

John Wherry, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks a promising type of immunotherapy (a family of treatments that manipulate the body’s own immune system to fight disease) could reverse this exhaustion, helping patients with melanoma and other similar cancers. In those diseases, tumors hide from the body’s T cells by attaching a molecule called PD-L1 onto their surface. The T cells sniff out this molecule to distinguish friend from foe: If they encounter a cell with PD-L1 on its surface, they ignore it and move on without a fight. Cells without PD-L1 aren’t so lucky — the T cells immediately attack and destroy them.

T cells detect these friend-or-foe molecules via a lock-and-key receptor called PD-1. Blocking PD-1 can spur the T cells to attack invaders with renewed vigor. Treatments based on this mechanism have turned cancers that were a death sentence into curable diseases — but it’s far from a perfect system and many questions remain.

- Interview with immunologist John Wherry here

Quote of the Day

It is more important to prevent animal suffering, rather than sit to contemplate the evils of the universe praying in the company of priests.

- Buddha, 11 Famous Vegetarians In History + What We Can Learn From Them