Max's little baby is today 7!
You saved my life my love - for all the unfairness I dwelt in after Max, for all the deep depression I resided in...
With your adamance, hard headed-ness, naughtiness, and unfiltered independence - you didn’t give a fly fuck about where I dwelling in those dark days and you sucked me out of it.
Thank you! You gave me so much and I hope, you feel the same way,
I am and will be eternally grateful for you.
Happy B'day my love!
How is it possible for music to alter the world like this? It’s like when you take a scene from a horror movie and add funny music and the killer suddenly looks hilarious. Isn’t it strange that that happens? Why can we put certain sounds together that make the trees feel unfamiliar? Music is tones and rhythms in various mathematical relationships to each other—it is almost pure abstraction.2 Why should that move us? It is a realm of patterns largely independent of outside reality, and yet, when Maud closes her eyes, the music leads her somewhere, to some inner landscape.
How can these landscapes arise?
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Experiencing music can give us the feeling that we are confronted with “the deepest recesses of our nature,” as Schopenhauer put it. His explanation for that feeling, by the way, was very different from the accounts I’ve given so far. He didn’t merely think music evoked emotions; he thought music and emotions were both evoking something, and evoking the same thing, something more fundamental than both. Let me give his theory as an example of how people have gone about attributing music to sources outside normal reality.
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Now that I think about it, I suspect the reason I’m dissatisfied with all of the explanations of why music moves us comes down to this enormous distance between how simple the building blocks are and how far reaching their consequences.
I wonder if music is perhaps best thought of as an emergent phenomenon. It is built from small, mundane actions (plucking a string, manipulating our emotional processing, synchronizing our body movements with others to create a sense of bonding, and so on). But the thing that emerges (these swooping existential experiences) can’t be understood by just looking at the building blocks—much as the behavior of a sand dune can’t be understood by considering a single grain of sand. Sand dunes move around, larger ones more slowly than smaller ones, and when they collide, they exchange sand in various ways—none of which are properties that sand grains have.
New levels of emergence like this require their own concepts and explanations. And perhaps the vague, poetic language we reach for when talking about what music does to us—saying it feels like it “lifts us up” or “confronts us with a deeper reality,” and so on—is the best we can do when talking about the ever-evolving desert landscapes that arise, inexplicably, out of the simple-looking sand grains called notes.7 Perhaps I just have to accept that.
However that may be, it is astounding that we get to live in a universe where music is possible. Absolutely astounding.
- More Here
So what can be done? Not everything, but something.
The answer probably does not lie in grand solutions or sentimental language about reconnecting. It lies in recovering forms of attention that modern life has made rare. A real conversation without hurry. A friendship that does not depend on performance. A commitment to fewer but deeper bonds. The ability to sit in silence without immediately reaching for distraction. The humility to let another person remain complex, opaque, and irreducible. The willingness to stay with a book, a piece of music, a walk, a sorrow, or a difficult thought long enough for it to change us.
These are small acts, but small acts are often where the human is either lost or saved. Modern life trains us to think scale is what matters: larger networks, wider visibility, more options, more access, more speed. But a soul is not repaired at scale. It is repaired through depth. Through repetition. Through fidelity. Through the slow rebuilding of the capacity to attend.
Maybe that is where hope begins: not in the fantasy of escaping modernity, but in resisting some of its most deforming habits. In refusing to treat every silence as empty, every pause as waste, every relationship as exchange, every self as brand. In relearning the difficult art of presence.
To be present is more demanding than it sounds. It means giving attention without immediate self-reference. It means listening without preparing a performance. It means staying long enough for the other person to become real beyond your use for them. It means inhabiting your own life rather than racing past it. Presence is not passive. It is one of the highest forms of discipline.
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How do we begin again? Probably not all at once. Probably not dramatically. We begin by staying.
Staying in a conversation long enough for it to become real. Staying with a friend long enough to move past pleasantries. Staying with a grief long enough to understand what it is asking of us. Staying with ourselves long enough to hear a voice beneath the noise.
The loneliness of modern man is not simply that he has fewer people around him. It is that he has lost too many of the conditions under which presence becomes possible.
- More Here
The story of legends who were humble and spearheaded innovation (rather than the current "business", non technical, marvel loving morons with no sense of common sense):
The Conjecture
The document that named artificial intelligence opens with a single bold sentence: "The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." Nobody in 1955 had established this conjecture. Nobody has established it since.
The document was a grant proposal, dated 31 August 1955 and submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation two days later. It asked for $13,500, ten participants, and two months at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. It introduced, for the first time in print, the phrase "artificial intelligence." The summer workshop it funded was smaller, shorter, and less conclusive than seventy years of retelling have suggested. Its name, however, has outlasted everything.
The Proposal
The proposal opened with its conjecture and then listed seven research problems: automatic computers and how to program them; how to make a computer use language; neuron nets; a theory of the size of calculations; self-improvement; abstraction; and randomness and creativity. The document did not say how anyone would know whether progress on any of these had been made. It said that significant advances were likely if a carefully chosen group worked together for a summer.
Of the four signatories, Shannon was by some distance the most famous scientist on the page: he had already founded information theory, was co-editing a volume with McCarthy, and had results in cryptography and the theory of Turing machines. Minsky, a Harvard Junior Fellow in mathematics and neurology, had built a machine for simulating learning by nerve nets and completed a Princeton PhD thesis entitled "Neural Nets and the Brain Model Problem." Rochester was Manager of Information Research at IBM, jointly responsible for the design of the IBM Type 701, who had also worked on simulation of nerve nets to test theories in neurophysiology. McCarthy, the youngest, was an assistant professor of mathematics at Dartmouth who had worked on Turing machines, the speed of computers, and the use of languages by machines. The contrast between Shannon's standing and McCarthy's juniority is worth holding in mind: the youngest and least established man in the room had picked the name and written the central conjecture.
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What endured was not a research programme but a label and a concept. The name "artificial intelligence" gave a new field a clear identity distinct from cybernetics, from automata theory, from complex information processing. Departments could take the name, and did. Funding lines could adopt it, and did. Within two years, McCarthy and Minsky had started the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project; McCarthy later founded the Stanford AI Laboratory in 1962 and won the Turing Award in 1971; Newell and Simon won the 1975 Turing Award for the work that had its public debut in Hanover.40 Rochester's enthusiasm for Minsky's geometry-machine idea, taken back to IBM, set Herbert Gelernter working on a geometry theorem prover, with McCarthy as a consultant, and Gelernter presented a major paper on the result in 1959.41 None of this was the result of the summer's collective work. It was the result of those weeks of conversation, disagreement, and proximity.
The more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become.
Pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.
That timeless wisdom was from Alan Watts and it is called "Backward Law".
I never knew this law but somehow it was instilled as part of everyday life for Max and I.
I don't even pursue peace as peace is a place Max and I live.
Written post Katrina in 2006 - lot of truth if you can try to filter out the ideology:
It is generally accepted among environmental geographers that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. In every phase and aspect of a disaster—causes, vulnerability, preparedness, results and response, and reconstruction—the contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus. Hurricane Katrina provides the most startling confirmation of that axiom. This is not simply an academic point but a practical one, and it has everything to do with how societies prepare for and absorb natural events and how they can or should reconstruct afterward. It is difficult, so soon on the heels of such an unnecessarily deadly disaster, to be discompassionate, but it is important in the heat of the moment to put social science to work as a counterweight to official attempts to relegate Katrina to the historical dustbin of inevitable “natural” disasters.
First, causes. The denial of the naturalness of disasters is in no way a denial of natural process. Earthquakes, tsunamis, blizzards, droughts, and hurricanes are certainly events of nature that require a knowledge of geophysics, physical geography, or climatology to comprehend. Whether a natural event is a disaster or not depends ultimately, however, on its location. A large earthquake in the Hindu Kush may spawn no disaster whatsoever while the same intensity event in California could be a catastrophe. But even among climatic events, natural causes are not entirely divorced from the social. The world has recently experienced dramatic warming, which scientists increasingly attribute to airborne emissions of carbon, and around the world Katrina is widely seen as evidence of socially induced climatic change. Much as a single hurricane such as Katrina, even when followed by an almost equally intense Hurricane Rita, or even when embedded in a record 2005 season of Atlantic hurricanes, is not in itself conclusive evidence of humanly induced global warming. Yet it would be irresponsible to ignore such signals.
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Vulnerability, in turn, is highly differentiated; some people are much more vulnerable than others. Put bluntly, in many climates rich people tend to take the higher land leaving to the poor and working-class land more vulnerable to flooding and environmental pestilence. This is a trend, not an iron clad generalization: oceanfront property marks a major exception in many places, and Bolivia’s La Paz, where the wealthy live in the cooler valley below 13,000 feet, is another. In New Orleans, however, topographic gradients doubled as class and race gradients, and as the Katrina evacuation so tragically demonstrated, the better off had cars to get out, credit cards and bank accounts for emergency hotels and supplies, their immediate families likely had resources to support their evacuation, and the wealthier also had the insurance policies for rebuilding.
For instance, city dwellers who live in neighborhoods with more trees (and often more resources) tend to have lower dementia risk and better heart and lung health, and are less likely to die prematurely as a result. Urban forests are also associated with cooler temperatures, cleaner air and water, and greater biodiversity. Yet until recently, few studies have measured the magnitude of these benefits in “health, deaths, or dollars,” says Colorado State University environmental epidemiologist David Rojas-Rueda.
Now, as Seattle and dozens of other cities across the United States work to expand their urban canopies, Rojas-Rueda and his collaborators have quantified the health and economic gains that cities could achieve if they actually meet their lofty goals. Seattle, for instance, is shooting to reach 30 percent tree cover (from its current 28 percent) by 2037. New York City aims to jump from 23 to 30 percent by 2040. Each city’s goal is unique, based on local ecology, climate, and other factors.
Hitting such targets, the researchers found, could collectively avoid more than 67,000 premature deaths across 144 cities, along with alleviating US $539 billion in economic burden from lives lost.
- More Here
Wow, wonderful post covering what one needs to get started in Math!
Math has a bad reputation. I believe it is the most beautiful form of human thought, but most people see it as a sterile rule system made to punish students. This disconnect is due to the way our schooling system approaches math — it focuses on the mechanics and not the why. While the basics are necessary, they can hide the deeper beauty that math contains. Luckily, it is easier than ever to get an amazing mathematics education on your own thanks to the internet.
[---]Before I begin my subject recommendations, there are some things to keep in mind. These pieces of advice come from my own experience with 10+ years of self-studying math and working as a college math teacher. I have provided sources where relevant if you want to see why I recommend these practices.
- First, accept that this will be hard. Math is a new language that has to be mastered. It is much less flexible and more demanding than any spoken language. Expect to run into roadblocks and to have to push yourself. Some ideas will take a long time to get comfortable with; you are literally forming new connections in your brain as you study math!
- The best way to study anything is with consistency, not 3-hour marathon sessions once a month. Your brain works better on 15 solid minutes a day. My rule of thumb is to never miss two days in a row. Life gets in the way, and I can’t always make every day work, but I go out of my way to never let that happen twice.
- I remind my students about this all the time: the only way to learn math is to actually do problems. Following along with a video is an important step, but you do not understand something until you can solve the problems on your own. My recommended resources are largely based on the quality of their problems.
- Studying math can be lonely, but it doesn’t have to be. Find someone who wants to learn the same content and work together. This will help you both with accountability and increase your understanding as you talk through the content with each other. Maybe we can create an online community of people learning different topics: any interest?
- AI can be an excellent tool for self-studying math, if used correctly. There is no substitute for a good teacher, but AI can give intuitive explanations and help check your work. Resist the temptation to use it to overcome every obstacle you face, but it can be wonderful for checking your work or offering hints when there aren’t answers provided.
- Interested in one-on-one tutoring and guidance for your studies? Send me a message; maybe I can help
- Take breaks! Schools know this and have many breaks throughout a semester and even longer breaks between semesters. If an idea isn’t sticking, sometimes you need to walk away and do something else for it to click. Let your subconscious tackle it for a while. Rest is just as important as the work.
- And most importantly, have fun! You are doing this for you. Discipline can only take you so far; remember why you are self-studying math in the first place.
Part of the problem with standard college mathematics curriculum is that it heavily emphasizes calculus. I love teaching calculus, and I think the subject is really fun, but this sequence is based on outdated priorities left over from the space race. Calculus certainly has its place, but it is not the only subject to study.
White Swans are more worrisome than Black Swans.
Even fundamental; the mere existence of Swans should teach us a thing or two about risk.
