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.
“There is no adventure without risk,” Yvon said. “You get something important from committing to whatever you do. And if you don’t risk your neck, you haven’t made a big enough commitment. We climb for our own pleasure or to become a better person; otherwise it’s just a sport. But climbing is really a passion. And the commitment isn’t random. Every climber I know has had a fucked-up experience with their father or almost-father. Mine was an alcoholic. I was never close to him. It was a traumatic household. I spent a lot of my life just getting away from that. And I was never on the typical career path where you go to college and you learn something, then you go work at that and you know what’s expected of you. I had to find my own way of dealing with life. Climbing, for me and my friends, it saved our lives. It gave us a purpose even though it was a meaningless purpose. Every time we’d go out to do something, we gained confidence in ourselves.”
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“I’ve been a student of Zen Buddhism for a lot of my life,” Chouinard said, “and it’s taught me that with business as with everything else, if you do everything the right way, profits will come. So you don’t focus on profit. You focus on intent. Climbing is the same way. So is cooking. Simplicity of intent forces creativity, and creativity is where we find pleasure. I did a little film about this eighty- year- old guy in Italy who fishes with a big old bamboo rod and makes his own horsehair lines and ties his own tiny flies by hand. He doesn’t use anything fancy, but you can’t out fish this guy.
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I’ve always believed that you achieve perfection through simplicity. It’s so easy to complicate your life. It’s so much harder to simplify it. That’s why I don’t have a Yvon Chouinard computer. I don’t have a cell phone, either. I don’t have any of that shit ’cause I don’t want it. Just say no. And I’ve applied that principle in all kinds of places. Once, I had the idea to kayak the Gros Ventre River without a paddle. It was pretty serious water. My friend lost his boat, and it ended up all the way down in the Snake River. But I had learned how to roll a kayak upright with just my hands—in case I lost my paddle—and it gave me this wild idea to try the whole river that way. A paddle is a powerful thing. You can see a rock coming and just do one deep stroke to get around it. Without a paddle, you have to look much farther ahead and prepare. The boat becomes like a pair of skis that you have put on edge to turn. I found that I had to sit way down low in the boat and turn by putting the boat on edge with my hands. I had been kayaking all over South America and New Guinea and doing first descents, but that was the day I really learned to kayak.
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In fact, right now, we’re trying to get Patagonia back to that initial intention. Every company needs a revolution every ten years and we’re going through a big one right now. Because a while back, I was sitting at my desk and a bunch of people came roaring in and said, ‘Guess what? We just hit a billion dollars in sales!’ And I just went, ‘Fuck.’ I was so bummed out because I knew that running a billion-dollar company was a lot different from running a little climbing hardware company and that we could easily become the bureaucracy, the behemoth, that we didn’t want to be. And in fact, it was turning out that way.
I had a CEO at the time who was opening up new accounts in general sporting goods stores and department stores. We were making a 20 percent net profit but selling out—just like The North Face did when they hired Kim Kardashian to do a skiwear line. Because they exceeded the size they should be. So we cut way back. We killed all our department store accounts. And that’s about living within our limits. And I mean, what happens when you’re free soloing and you exceed your limits? You die. That’s what we were facing. I want Patagonia to be a company that grows maybe 5 percent a year. Maximum. Just to keep up with inflation and make a decent profit and have a good culture. Keep a good lifestyle. And I don’t see any examples of anyone else who has done that. Name one company that’s purposely restricted its own growth. But that’s what Patagonia is about now. We’ve been in business fifty- four years. So what are the next fifty years going to be about? I have four thousand employees around the world. They’re all dependent on the company’s survival and yet our products are getting knocked off by everybody else.
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I don’t think you can be an excellent company or make excellent products by getting bigger and bigger. You lose control. The average age of an American corporation before it goes belly- up is less than eighteen years. If we decided, at Patagonia, to start making watches and sunglasses, that would be suicide for what we wanna do. There’s a limit to everything. I don’t care what it is. Everybody dies, no exceptions. Every empire collapses, usually after 200 to 250 years.
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In 2022, Yvon gave Patagonia away—the whole company, I mean. He gave it to a nonprofit foundation that he created with one goal: environmental conservation.
“I gave Patagonia away three or four years ago because I didn’t see any other way,” he said. “My kids didn’t want to inherit the company. They have simple lives like I do. I didn’t want to take Patagonia public because we’d end up killing the company’s values. I didn’t want to bring in an Yvon Chouinard investor or a partner, because those relationships always fall apart, just like most marriages. And I didn’t want to sell for the same reason—there was no way to sell and still be sure that the values endured.”
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“But giving it away worked out great,” Yvon told me. “You’ve seen my lifestyle. I don’t need any money. You’ve seen my place in Jackson. I’ve been in that house for fifty years, and half the electrical wiring is burned out.”
- Excerpts from the new book Rules to Live By: How Extraordinary Lives Define What Really Matters by Jimmy Chin (profiles the founder of Patagonia Yvon Chouinard)
Epistemological Modesty, my friend. Epistemological Modesty!
Beautiful list and stupid me, I thought we knew the answers to a few of these questions and some, I didn't even know it was a "question".
There are so many unknown questions about animals and biology in general than physics. I am glad that many minds are working on these.
The bigger fear is what scientists call “multiple breadbasket failures” – that is, several of the world’s great growing regions failing at once. The journalist George Monbiot tells me that globalisation has allowed us to make up for a bad harvest in one region with imports from another. This year, military activity has at times reduced Russia and Ukraine’s Black Sea grain export capacity by 97 per cent, and the Iran war has throttled Hormuz – the conduit for a third of the world’s urea, a fertiliser. El Niño is bearing down on India’s rice, Australia’s wheat and southern Africa’s maize.
India, at least, has a buffer. The monsoon season was drier than expected, but Delhi is sitting on a record strategic reserve of 59.6 million tonnes of rice, and has so far resisted repeating the 2023 export ban that pushed world rice prices up by more than a fifth. Britain? “We used to have strategic food reserves in this country,” Monbiot says. “ But we left it all to the private sector who have now moved to this just-in-time production and delivery model.” The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs estimates that the UK imports roughly 40 per cent of its food.
And what does come from our own fields is coming under increasing pressure. This summer’s drought reduced expected wheat yields by a seventh. The Met Office says El Niño is likely to lead to a wet and stormy autumn, and a colder than usual winter. During the last El Niño winter, in 2023, fields were so sodden that the following year’s wheat harvest fell by a fifth.
Monbiot’s deeper worry is that the food system now looks like the banks before the financial crash: concentrated, efficient and without flexibility. In 2008, governments rescued the banks by issuing future money. “If the food system starts to go down,” he says, “you can’t bail it out by issuing future food.” Food security and self-sufficiency, at a governmental and household level, is one of the central issues of our uncertain times.
But there are two things I can say for certain: next year is going to be hotter. And your big shop, dearer.
- More Here
Living through something is not the same as learning from it, and learning from it is not the same as consciously extracting and communicating the wisdom it contains.
Many don't learn even from painful experiences.
Learning without experiencing firsthand and by using wisdom from past humans is absolutely free and will save one’s life.
This is "magic" behind the long survival of organic life on this planet.
