Wisdom Of The Week

New research published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the first to provide a heart rate profile for free-ranging blue whales. The resulting data shows how the hearts of these enormous cetaceans help them hold their breath for prolonged periods of time as well as how they’re suddenly able to exert the energy needed for lunge feeding and then replenish their blood oxygen levels when back at the surface.

At the same time, the new study, co-authored by marine biologist Jeremy Goldbogen from the School of Humanities Sciences at Stanford University, suggests the blue whale has reached the largest size possible for an aquatic organism on Earth. The cardiovascular system of the blue whale, while impressive, is probably the limit of what is biologically possible, according to the new research.

Blue whales are the largest creatures to have ever lived on the planet. These aquatic mammals can reach upwards of 30 meters (98 feet) in length and weigh an astonishing 173 metric tons (380,000 pounds or 172,365 kilograms). To put this into perspective, that’s equal to about 292 very heavy African elephants—currently the largest terrestrial animal on Earth.

Living in the ocean is what allow blue whales to grow to such an enormous size possible, as no creature of that immensity could possibly support itself on land. The largest land animals to have ever lived were the titanosaurs, a group of four-legged, long-necked dinosaurs that included Argentinosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Rapetosaurus. These herbivores got as long as 15 meters (50 feet) and weighed nearly 82 metric tons (180,780 pounds or 82,000 kilograms). They were big, no doubt about it, but not nearly as big as the blue whale.>br>
The new research notes that another important factor allowing blue whales to grow so large is their highly specialized cardiovascular system. For marine biologists, however, understanding exactly what makes the blue whale’s heart tick has proven difficult given they’re almost too big to measure. To overcome this hurdle, Goldbogen and his colleagues developed an electrocardiogram (ECG) tag that they attached to a blue whale with suction cups.

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The heart rate profile for the blue whale came as a surprise even to the researchers. The observed bradycardia was 30 to 50 times lower than expected. The low rate was made possible by an elastic-like part of the whale’s body called an aortic arch, according to the new paper. This remarkable piece of whale anatomy transports blood to the outer reaches of the whale’s gigantic body, contracting slowly to maintain blood flow during the long interval between beats. The heart’s unique pulsations and shape keeps blood flowing and is what makes the whale’s higher heart rate possible.

During tachycardia, the blue whale’s heart rate is likely working at the highest maximum limit allowable by the constraints of biology, according to the authors. A more robust cardiovascular system is not likely, they argue, and the new research may actually explain why no species on Earth has grown bigger than the blue whale.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

What I've Been Reading

To achieve stillness, we'll need to focus on three domains, the timeless trinity of mind, body, soul - the head, the heart, the flesh. 

Stillness Is The Key by Ryan Holiday.

One of the best books of the year and one of the best books, I have ever read. The chapter titles of each of the three domains speaks volume of how much one can learn from this book.

Mind: 

• Become Present
• Limit Your Inputs
• Empty The Mind
• Slow Down, Think Deeply
• Start Journaling 
• Cultivate Silence
• Seek Wisdom
• Find Confidence, Avoid Ego
• Let Go

Spirit:

• Choose Virtue 
• Heal The Inner Child 
• Beware Desire
• Enough
• Bathe In Beauty
• Accept A Higher Power
• Enter Relationship
• Conquer Your Anger
• All Is One

Body:

• Say No
• Take A Walk
• Build A Routine
• Get Rid Of Your Stuff
• Seek Solitude
• Be A Human Being
• Go To Sleep
• Find A Hobby
• Beware Escapism
• Act Bravely

Quote of the Day

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

What I've Been Reading

There are many things in life we can do nothing about - the circumstances of our childhoods; natural events in the outer world; the chaos and catastrophe of illness, accident, loss, and abuse - but there is one thing we can change. How we interact with our ego is up to us. We get very little help with this in life.

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The bottom line is this: The go needs all the help it can get. We can all benefit from getting over ourselves. 

Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself by Mark Epstein, M.D.

Much needed book in this me, me, me world - a beautiful amalgamation of Buddhism and psychology to eradicate ego to help ourselves and in the process make the world a better place. A must-read.

Awakening does not make the ego disappear: it changes one's relationship to it. The balance of power shifts, but there is still work to do. Rather than being driven by selfish concerns, one finds it necessary to take personal responsibility for them. In Buddhism, this engagement with the go is described as both the path to enlightenment and the path out of it. It is traditionally explained as an Eightfold Path:

• Right View - Right View asks us to focus on incontrovertible truth of impermanence rather than trying to shore up a flawed and insecure self.
• Right Motivation - Right Motivation encourages us to come out from our hiding place, to use our powers of observation for our good, and to be real with ourselves.
• Right Speech - Right Speech asks us to take seriously the stories we tell ourselves, but not to take them for granted. Seeing them clearly gives us back some power over them. "Just because you think it," I often say to my patients, "doesn't make it true."
• Right Action - Postponing the ego's need for immediate gratification is the core principle for this aspect of the Eightfold Path. There is a famous phrase in Japanese Buddism that tries to explain this. "Learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate your self," it suggests. Then "body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will manifest."
• Right Livelihood - Classically, it means avoiding some of the worst qualities of human beings are capable of: those involving deceit or exploitation. Examples from the Buddha's time include trading in weapons, buying and selling human beings, killing animals, selling drugs or other intoxicants, and manufacturing or distributing poison. As these ancient examples suggest, things have not changed very much. Buddha made the Right Livelihood the centerpiece of the Eightfold Path. Right Livelihood encourages us to be ethically aware of how we interact and how we relate - not just to our level of achievement.
• Right Effort - Right Effort suggests that it is possible, and often desirable, to gain control over one' ego's impulses. The precondition for this is the ability we all have, however underutilized, to observe our own minds.
• Right Mindfulness - The trick of Right Mindfulness is not to turn into another method for self-improvement. Mindfulness, once established, continues on its own stream. It hacks into the mind to see what is there, and, out of this self-observation, interesting, unexcepted, and sometimes uncomfortable things can emerge. The original word in the language of the Buddha's time was sati. Sati means remembering. Right Mindfulness - or Right Sati - means remembering to keep an eye on oneself. 
• Right Concentration - Concentration is "Right" when it connects with the other branches of the whole. It is "Right" when it demonstrates the feasibility of training the mind, when it supports the investigation of impermanence, when it erodes selfish preoccupation, and when it reveals the benefits of surrender. It is not "Right" when it is seen as an end in itself and when it is used to avoid painful truths. One can hide out in the peaceful states that meditative concentration makes possible, but in the context of Eightfold Path, this is considered a mistake. 

To counter the persistent and insidious influence of ego has on us - called 'self-grasping' in Buddhist thought - one has to be willing to work with it on all eight levels before awakening and after.

We are human as a result of suffering, not in spite of it. 

Quote of the Day

If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals.

Can we tell a new story?

- Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

Quote of the Day

The word “coherence” literally means holding or sticking together, but it is usually used to refer to a system, an idea, or a worldview whose parts fit together in a consistent and efficient way. Coherent things work well: A coherent worldview can explain almost anything, while an incoherent worldview is hobbled by internal contradictions. …

Whenever a system can be analyzed at multiple levels, a special kind of coherence occurs when the levels mesh and mutually interlock. We saw this cross-level coherence in the analysis of personality: If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living. When these levels do not cohere, you are likely to be torn by internal contradictions and neurotic conflicts. You might need adversity to knock yourself into alignment. And if you do achieve coherence, the moment when things come together may be one of the most profound of your life. … Finding coherence across levels feels like enlightenment, and it is crucial for answering the question of purpose within life.

People are multilevel systems in another way: We are physical objects (bodies and brains) from which minds somehow emerge; and from our minds, somehow societies and cultures form. To understand ourselves fully we must study all three levels—physical, psychological, and sociocultural. There has long been a division of academic labor: Biologists studied the brain as a physical object, psychologists studied the mind, and sociologists and anthropologists studied the socially constructed environments within which minds develop and function. But a division of labor is productive only when the tasks are coherent—when all lines of work eventually combine to make something greater than the sum of its parts. For much of the twentieth century that didn’t happen — each field ignored the others and focused on its own questions. But nowadays cross-disciplinary work is flourishing, spreading out from the middle level (psychology) along bridges (or perhaps ladders) down to the physical level (for example, the field of cognitive neuroscience) and up to the sociocultural level (for example, cultural psychology). The sciences are linking up, generating cross-level coherence, and, like magic, big new ideas are beginning to emerge.

Here is one of the most profound ideas to come from the ongoing synthesis: People gain a sense of meaning when their lives cohere across the three levels of their existence.

- Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

Quote of the Day

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

Even Socrates, who lived a very frugal and simple life, loved to go to the market. When his students asked about this, he replied, "I love to go and see all the things I am happy without.”

- Jack Kornfield

Quote of the Day

If You Think You're Enlightened, Go Spend a Week with Your Family.

- Ram Dass

Wisdom Of The Week

Through his career, Hilbert was interested in the ultimate limits of mathematical knowledge: what can humans know about mathematics, in principle, and what (if any) parts of mathematics are forever unknowable by humans? Roughly speaking, Hilbert’s 1928 problem asked whether there exists a general algorithm a mathematician can follow which would let them figure out whether any given mathematical statement is provable. Hilbert’s hoped-for algorithm would be a little like the paper-and-pencil algorithm for multiplying two numbers. Except instead of starting with two numbers, you’d start with a mathematical conjecture, and after going through the steps of the algorithm you’d know whether that conjecture was provable. The algorithm might be too time-consuming to use in practice, but if such an algorithm existed, then there would be a sense in which mathematics was knowable, at least in principle.

In 1928, the notion of an algorithm was pretty vague. Up to that point, algorithms were often carried out by human beings using paper and pencil, as in the multiplication algorithm just mentioned, or the long-division algorithm. Attacking Hilbert’s problem forced Turing to make precise exactly what was meant by an algorithm. To do this, Turing described what we now call a Turing machine: a single, universal programmable computing device that Turing argued could perform any algorithm whatsoever.

Today we’re used to the idea that computers can be programmed to do many different things. In Turing’s day, however, the idea of a universal programmable computer was remarkable. Turing was arguing that a single, fixed device could imitate any algorithmic process whatsoever, provided the right program was supplied. It was an amazing leap of imagination, and the foundation of modern computing.

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There’s a wrinkle in this story. Deutsch is a physicist with a background in quantum mechanics. And in trying to answer his question, Deutsch observed that ordinary, everyday computers based on Turing’s model have a lot of trouble simulating quantum mechanical systemsResearchers such as Yu Manin and Richard Feynman had previously observed this, and as a result had speculated about computers based on quantum mechanics.. In particular, they seem to be extraordinarily slow and inefficient at doing such simulations. To answer his question affirmatively, Deutsch was forced to invent a new type of computing system, a quantum computer. Those quantum computers can do everything conventional computers can do, but are also capable of efficiently simulating quantum-mechanical processes. And so they are arguably a more natural computing model than conventional computers. If we ever meet aliens, my bet is that they’ll use quantum computers (or, perhaps, will have quantum computing brains). After all, it’s likely that aliens will be far more technologically advanced than current human civilization. And so they’ll use the computers natural for any technologically advanced society.

This essay explains how quantum computers work. It’s not a survey essay, or a popularization based on hand-wavy analogies. We’re going to dig down deep so you understand the details of quantum computing. Along the way, we’ll also learn the basic principles of quantum mechanics, since those are required to understand quantum computation.

Learning this material is challenging. Quantum computing and quantum mechanics are famously “hard” subjects, often presented as mysterious and forbidding. If this were a conventional essay, chances are that you’d rapidly forget the material. But the essay is also an experiment in the essay form. As I’ll explain in detail below the essay incorporates new user interface ideas to help you remember what you read. That may sound surprising, but uses a well-validated idea from cognitive science known as spaced-repetition testing. More detail on how it works below. The upshot is that anyone who is curious and determined can understand quantum computing deeply and for the long term.

- Quantum Computing for the Very Curious

Quote of the Day

My mind is like a bad neighborhood, I try not to go there alone.

- Jack Kornfield on Tim Ferris Podcast

Quote of the Day

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

The first key to leadership was self-control, particularly the mastery of pride, which was something more difficult, he explained, to subdue than a wild lion and anger, which was more difficult to defeat than the greatest wrestler. He warned them that "if you can't swallow your pride, you can't lead.”

- Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

Quote of the Day

Gentle medicine is not the audacious proposal that physicians should not intervene at all. We have a few magic bullets in our arsenal and we should use them. Rather, gentle medicine is the more modest proposal that physicians should intervene less, perhaps much less, than is presently the case, and we should try to improve health with changes to our lives and to our societies.

- Medical Nihilism by Jacob Stegenga

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

The greatest opportunity offered by AI is not reducing errors or workloads, or even curing cancer: it is the opportunity to restore the precious and time-honored connection and trust—the human touch—between patients and doctors. Not only would we have more time to come together, enabling far deeper communication and compassion, but also we would be able to revamp how we select and train doctors.

- Eric Topol, Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again

Quote of the Day

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law… That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do it openly, lovingly, … and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.

- Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Wisdom Of The Week

In what may come as a surprise to freethinkers and nonconformists happily defying social conventions these days in New York City, Paris, Sydney and other centers of Western culture, a new study traces the origins of contemporary individualism to the powerful influence of the Catholic Church in Europe more than 1,000 years ago, during the Middle Ages.

According to the researchers, strict church policies on marriage and family structure completely upended existing social norms and led to what they call “global psychological variation,” major changes in behavior and thinking that transformed the very nature of the European populations.

The study, published this week in Science, combines anthropology, psychology and history to track the evolution of the West, as we know it, from its roots in “kin-based” societies. The antecedents consisted of clans, derived from networks of tightly interconnected ties, that cultivated conformity, obedience and in-group loyalty—while displaying less trust and fairness with strangers and discouraging independence and analytic thinking.

The engine of that evolution, the authors propose, was the church’s obsession with incest and its determination to wipe out the marriages between cousins that those societies were built on. The result, the paper says, was the rise of “small, nuclear households, weak family ties, and residential mobility,” along with less conformity, more individuality, and, ultimately, a set of values and a psychological outlook that characterize the Western world. The impact of this change was clear: the longer a society’s exposure to the church, the greater the effect.

Around A.D. 500, explains Joseph Henrich, chair of Harvard University’s department of human evolutionary biology and senior author of the study, “the Western church, unlike other brands of Christianity and other religions, begins to implement this marriage and family program, which systematically breaks down these clans and kindreds of Europe into monogamous nuclear families. And we make the case that this then results in these psychological differences.”

- Western Individualism Arose from Incest Taboo

Quote of the Day

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Quote of the Day

I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but always when I have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished. I think that I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. There is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation; yet with every year I am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wisdom; at present I am no fisherman at all. But I see that if I were to live in a wilderness I should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

- Lao Tzu

Quote of the Day

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Quote of the Day

A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.

- Henri J.M. Nouwen

Quote of the Day

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.

- Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

Quote of the Day

Wisdom Of The Week

There are several implicit assertions in the JAFFE set. First there’s the taxonomy itself: that “emotions” is a valid set of visual concepts. Then there’s a string of additional assumptions: that the concepts within “emotions” can be applied to photographs of people’s faces (specifically Japanese women); that there are six emotions plus a neutral state; that there is a fixed relationship between a person’s facial expression and her true emotional state; and that this relationship between the face and the emotion is consistent, measurable, and uniform across the women in the photographs.

At the level of the class, we find assumptions such as “there is such a thing as a ‘neutral’ facial expression” and “the significant six emotional states are happy, sad, angry, disgusted, afraid, surprised.”At the level of labeled image, there are other implicit assumptions such as “this particular photograph depicts a woman with an ‘angry’ facial expression,” rather than, for example, the fact that this is an image of a woman mimicking an angry expression. These, of course, are all ‘performed” expressions—not relating to any interior state, but acted out in a laboratory setting. Every one of the implicit claims made at each level is, at best, open to question, and some are deeply contested.

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In the case of ImageNet, noun categories such as “apple” or “apple butter” might seem reasonably uncontroversial, but not all nouns are created equal. To borrow an idea from linguist George Lakoff, the concept of an “apple” is more nouny than the concept of “light”, which in turn is more nouny than a concept such as “health.”[17] Nouns occupy various places on an axis from the concrete to the abstract, and from the descriptive to the judgmental. These gradients have been erased in the logic of ImageNet. Everything is flattened out and pinned to a label, like taxidermy butterflies in a display case. The results can be problematic, illogical, and cruel, especially when it comes to labels applied to people.

ImageNet contains 2,833 subcategories under the top-level category “Person.” The subcategory with the most associated pictures is “gal” (with 1,664 images) followed by “grandfather” (1,662), “dad” (1,643), and chief executive officer (1,614). With these highly populated categories, we can already begin to see the outlines of a worldview. ImageNet classifies people into a huge range of types including race, nationality, profession, economic status, behaviour, character, and even morality. There are categories for racial and national identities including Alaska Native, Anglo-American, Black, Black African, Black Woman, Central American, Eurasian, German American, Japanese, Lapp, Latin American, Mexican-American, Nicaraguan, Nigerian, Pakistani, Papuan, South American Indian, Spanish American, Texan, Uzbek, White, Yemeni, and Zulu. Other people are labeled by their careers or hobbies: there are Boy Scouts, cheerleaders, cognitive neuroscientists, hairdressers, intelligence analysts, mythologists, retailers, retirees, and so on.

As we go further into the depths of ImageNet’s Person categories, the classifications of humans within it take a sharp and dark turn. There are categories for Bad Person, Call Girl, Drug Addict, Closet Queen, Convict, Crazy, Failure, Flop, Fucker, Hypocrite, Jezebel, Kleptomaniac, Loser, Melancholic, Nonperson, Pervert, Prima Donna, Schizophrenic, Second-Rater, Spinster, Streetwalker, Stud, Tosser, Unskilled Person, Wanton, Waverer, and Wimp. There are many racist slurs and misogynistic terms.

Of course, ImageNet was typically used for object recognition—so the Person category was rarely discussed at technical conferences, nor has it received much public attention. However, this complex architecture of images of real people, tagged with often offensive labels, has been publicly available on the internet for a decade. It provides a powerful and important example of the complexities and dangers of human classification, and the sliding spectrum between supposedly unproblematic labels like “trumpeter” or “tennis player” to concepts like “spastic,” “mulatto,” or “redneck.” Regardless of the supposed neutrality of any particular category, the selection of images skews the meaning in ways that are gendered, racialized, ableist, and ageist. ImageNet is an object lesson, if you will, in what happens when people are categorized like objects. And this practice has only become more common in recent years, often inside the big AI companies, where there is no way for outsiders to see how images are being ordered and classified.

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In 1839, the mathematician François Arago claimed that through photographs, “objects preserve mathematically their forms.”[19] Placed into the nineteenth-century context of imperialism and social Darwinism, photography helped to animate—and lend a “scientific” veneer to—various forms of phrenology, physiognomy, and eugenics.[20] Physiognomists such as Francis Galton and Cesare Lombroso created composite images of criminals, studied the feet of prostitutes, measured skulls, and compiled meticulous archives of labeled images and measurements, all in an effort to use “mechanical” processes to detect visual signals in classifications of race, criminality, and deviance from bourgeois ideals. This was done to capture and pathologize what was seen as deviant or criminal behavior, and make such behavior observable in the world.

And as we shall see, not only have the underlying assumptions of physiognomy made a comeback with contemporary training sets, but indeed a number of training sets are designed to use algorithms and facial landmarks as latter-day calipers to conduct contemporary versions of craniometry.

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Datasets aren’t simply raw materials to feed algorithms, but are political interventions. As such, much of the discussion around “bias” in AI systems misses the mark: there is no “neutral,” “natural,” or “apolitical” vantage point that training data can be built upon. There is no easy technical “fix” by shifting demographics, deleting offensive terms, or seeking equal representation by skin tone. The whole endeavor of collecting images, categorizing them, and labeling them is itself a form of politics, filled with questions about who gets to decide what images mean and what kinds of social and political work those representations perform.

- Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen

Quote of the Day

We live in the age of philosophy, science, and intellect. Huge libraries are open for everyone. Everywhere we have schools, colleges, and universities which give us the wisdom of the people from many previous millennia. And what then? Have we become wiser for all this? Do we better understand our life, or the meaning of our existence? Do we know what is good for our life?

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as quoted by Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom

Quote of the Day

When someone isn’t seen for what they truly are, that’s a very dangerous thing.

- Paul Randolph in Motherless Brooklyn

Quote of the Day

If you believe that humans are animals, there can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans. If we speak of the history of the species at all, it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives. As with other animals, some lives are happy, others wretched. None has a meaning that lies beyond itself.

- John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

Quote of the Day

The Universe is full of dots. Connect the right ones and you can draw anything. The important question is not whether the dots you picked are really there, but why you chose to ignore all the others.

- Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

Quote of the Day

What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draws lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. Perhaps we need only to know how his shores trend and his adjacent country or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If he is surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achillean shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a corresponding depth in him. But a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. In our bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off to and indicates a corresponding depth of thought.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don’t have the strength.

- Theodore Roosevelt

Quote of the Day

For too long, gentlemen by way of abuses that one can never too strongly accuse of having taken pace because of our lack of understanding and ignorance - for every long time, I say - we have been victims of your greed and your avarice. Under the blows of your barbarous whip we have accumulated for you the treasures you enjoy in this colony; the human race has suffered to see with what barbarity you have treated men like yourself...

- Toussaint Louverture, Letters to the General Assembly (1792)

Wisdom Of The Week

• Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can.

• Decide on your paper’s theme and two or three points you want every reader to remember. This theme and these points form the single thread that runs through your piece. The words, sentences, paragraphs and sections are the needlework that holds it together. If something isn’t needed to help the reader to understand the main theme, omit it.

• Limit each paragraph to a single message. A single sentence can be a paragraph. Each paragraph should explore that message by first asking a question and then progressing to an idea, and sometimes to an answer. It’s also perfectly fine to raise questions in a paragraph and leave them unanswered.

• Keep sentences short, simply constructed and direct. Concise, clear sentences work well for scientific explanations. Minimize clauses, compound sentences and transition words — such as ‘however’ or ‘thus’ — so that the reader can focus on the main message.

• Don’t slow the reader down. Avoid footnotes because they break the flow of thoughts and send your eyes darting back and forth while your hands are turning pages or clicking on links. Try to avoid jargon, buzzwords or overly technical language. And don’t use the same word repeatedly — it’s boring.

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• When you think you’re done, read your work aloud to yourself or a friend. Find a good editor you can trust and who will spend real time and thought on your work. Try to make life as easy as possible for your editing friends. Number pages and double space.

• After all this, send your work to the journal editors. Try not to think about the paper until the reviewers and editors come back with their own perspectives. When this happens, it’s often useful to heed Rudyard Kipling’s advice: “Trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.” Change text where useful, and where not, politely explain why you’re keeping your original formulation

• And don’t rant to editors about the Oxford comma, the correct usage of ‘significantly’ or the choice of ‘that’ versus ‘which’. Journals set their own rules for style and sections. You won’t get exceptions.

• Finally, try to write the best version of your paper: the one that you like. You can’t please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself. Your paper — you hope — is for posterity. Remember how you first read the papers that inspired you while you enjoy the process of writing your own.

- Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper

Quote of the Day

Bushido teaches that men should behave according to an absolute moral standard, one that transcends logic. What’s right is right, and what’s wrong is wrong. The difference between good and bad and between right and wrong are givens, not arguments subject to discussion or justification, and a man should know the difference. Finally, it is a man’s obligation to teach his children moral standards through the model of his own behavior: The first objective of samurai education was to build up Character. The subtler faculties of prudence, intelligence, and dialectics were less important. Intellectual superiority was esteemed, but a samurai was essentially a man of action. 

- Self Control and Character, One of the Eight Virtues of Samurai Code (The Bushido Code)

Quote of the Day

It is Toussaint's supreme merit that while he saw European civilisation as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.

- C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution