Blotter

CREATED: [2022-04-29 Fri 01:19]

How to fix a book: first, gather your tools. The bone folder that feels familiar in your hand, the knitting needles still sticky with glue, the X-Acto knife, the tiny Tupperware of glue.

Then, diagnose the damage. If there’s scotch tape, grab the lighter fluid. If the book is on its last leg, worn out, prepare to make a box. Check that the guillotine is free.

Sometimes you need to be brutal, eschewing sentimentality as you cut off a spine or replace a book’s old, water-stained cover. At other times, gentle, delicate—especially with the books from Special Collections, those unique, fragile (and expensive) texts. And sometimes you find books with yellowed, stiff pages. The old dog-eared folds break off in triangles, flutter to the floor. These books can’t be helped by simple repairs—they’re acidified, dying, and the opposite of unique. In fact, they’re examples of a large-scale catastrophe that’s been quietly building in libraries for decades.

It’s called a “slow fire,” this continuous acidification and subsequent embrittlement of paper that was created with the seeds of its own ruin in its very fibers. In a 1987 documentary on the subject, the deputy Librarian of Congress William Welsh takes an embrittled, acid-burned book and begins tearing pages out by the handful, crumbling them into shards with an ease reminiscent of stepping on a dried-up insect carcass.

The surest sign of the apocalypse I've ever seen.

CREATED: [2022-04-29 Fri 01:18]

Replying to @arhayward It is often said that you should avoid using euphemism around autistic people, because they won't understand what you're saying, and will find it confusing. While this may be true to a degree, like all things autism, it isn't the whole picture. 1 10 325

Andrew Hayward @arhayward · Nov 25, 2021 Some autistic people understand euphemism just fine, and can in fact be incredibly subtle and sarcastic with their language. But this does not necessarily mean that they don't have problems with literalism. 2 34 479

Andrew Hayward @arhayward · Nov 25, 2021 Often, autistic people will hold on to very specific parts of your speech; details that are not necessarily "incorrect", but are also not in and of themselves correct either. 1 14 399

Andrew Hayward @arhayward · Nov 25, 2021 We all tend to exaggerate, or be loose with certain facts. But often, particularly in heated situations, it can be a huge stumbling block for an autistic brain…

"Why do you never do this?" "Well, I do, sometimes." "That's not my point." "But that's what you said." 7 74 542

Andrew Hayward @arhayward · Nov 25, 2021 Allistic people are seemingly able to understand, generally, that when a question is asked, it may be getting at a point not strictly addressed. An autistic person, however, may be quite surprised when their very specific response is not what was expected. 1 27 409

Andrew Hayward @arhayward · Nov 25, 2021 The reverse is also true; when an autistic person asks a question, receiving a response to your interpretation can throw them off completely. You might see the logical progression, but they may well need that step to get there themselves. 3 23 354

Andrew Hayward @arhayward · Nov 25, 2021 This is not to say that either party is wrong; it's just two different sets of approaches and expectations around communication.

Ultimately all we can do is be patient, understanding, and forgiving with each other. 11 30 416

CREATED: [2022-04-27 Wed 16:45]

Suppose Jop and Dop are college students who are dating. They disagree about two matters: whether it’s harder to get top grades in economics classes or philosophy classes, and whether they should move in together this summer. The first disagreement is over the truth of a claim: is the claim (or belief) ‘It is harder to get top grades in economics classes compared to philosophy classes’ true or not? The second disagreement is over an action: should we move in together or not (the action = moving in together)? Call the first kind of disagreement belief-disagreement; call the second kind action-disagreement.

The latter is very different from the former. Laksha is a doctor faced with a tough decision regarding one of her patients. She needs to figure out whether it’s best, all things considered, to just continue with the medications she has been prescribing or stop them and go with surgery. She confers closely with some of her colleagues. Some of them say surgery is the way to go, others say she should continue with medications and see what happens, but no one has a firm opinion: all the doctors agree that it’s a close call, all things considered. Laksha realizes that as far as anyone can tell it really is a tie.

In this situation Laksha should probably suspend judgment on each of the two claims ‘Surgery is the best overall option for this patient’ and ‘Medication is the best overall option for this patient’. When asked ‘Which option is best?’ she should suspend judgment.

That’s all well and good, but she still has to do something. She can’t just refuse to treat the patient. Even if she continues to investigate the case for days and days, in effect she has made the decision to not do surgery. She has made a choice even if she dithers.

More extremely useful disamibugations in here about what rationality is for somebody who can't know everything about a situation, especially if the situation is ill behaved relative to Wumpus.

CREATED: [2022-04-27 Wed 14:25]

Ontologies. Plural. What is, what might have been, what might yet be. This is a pretty stark contrast to ontology engineering, which is a different (and more engineering/computing-native) approach to the notion of ontology. Ontology engineering is an attempt to document the singular, rather than embrace the tensions of the multiple. Both have their place, but one has been more dominant in engineering/computing thought than the other, and unconsciously so – the same way most STEM researchers are working within a post-positivist paradigm, but don't (yet) know it.

So why all the Deaf/ASL resources?

Well… it's a rethinking of the world, and one that's taken place within a lot of living memory (and one that happens to be extraordinarily accessible to me). The past several decades have seen an explosion into the public sphere of a radical rethinking of what ASL is, what Deafness is, and what all these things could be. We've gone from "it's not really a language, it's a system of crude gestures" and "what a terrible disability" to… something that's exploded our notions of what language is and how it works. And linguistics had to figure out and built analysis tools and systems that could work with signed languages. A rapid turn-about between "what would this even look like?" to "maybe it looks like this, or this, or…this?" because… people… made it.

And then came the (again, radical!) idea that ASL could be used as an academic language, just like one might use English (or earlier, French… or German… or Latin…) as an academic language of instruction – and then publication. What does it mean to publish in a signed language? Again, there was no existing answer. So people made one. And then things like: what would an ASL-based software interface look like? We didn't know. And then ASLClear came out as one answer.

That's why I'm looking at these resources. Because I see in them a making of a world; the figuring-out and birthing of things that have never existed before. They happen to be Deaf; it happens to be a very, very good example for me to look at right now – but it's the process of the birth of worlds and universes that thrills me, and I want to look across worlds at the process of that birthing.

You see that? Do you see why I'm excited by this, why I love it, why I see it as so much bigger than just "Deaf Stuff In Engineering?" It's what Deaf Engineering (and queer engineering, and Hispanic engineering, and…) points to. We don't know, it doesn't exist… (see the ontoepistemology in there? the knowing, and the being?) – and then we make it. And we find out what things might be possible. And the ethics inherent in that (re)creation of the world – what and who does our making and remaking let in, who does it keep out? – that's where it gets ontoethicoepistemological. Nothing is value-neutral; nothing is apolitical. And nothing on this earth is going to be perfectly fair and universal and utopian; let's not pretend it is; let's be aware of our own footfalls in these spaces that we share.

I am so afraid of writing about this, thinking about it, letting it be known I'm interested in things that include the words "Deaf" and "ASL" and "engineering" in it, because – as I mentioned in a previous blog post – these kinds of things can be oversimplified and totalizing to one's scholarly identity, to how others describe and understand one's work. It's really important to me that I not get pigeonholed into "just" doing Deaf Engineering Things. Because there's so much more out there. There's so much, and I want to see and play within it, too.

vibrates

CREATED: [2022-04-27 Wed 14:20]
ID: bb836b00-f958-4704-bad9-8b69e8c4fac8

The idea was that there are not just many ways of knowing ‘an object’, but rather many ways of practising it. Each way of practising stages – performs, does, enacts – a different version of ‘the’ object. Hence, it is not ‘an object’, but more than one. An object multiple. That reality might be multiple goes head on against the Euroamerican tradition in which different people may each have their own perspective on reality, while there is only one reality – singular, coherent, elusive – to have ‘perspectives’ on.  To underline our break with this monorealist heritage of monotheism, we imported the old fashioned philosophical term of ontology and put it in the plural. Ontologies. That was – at the time – an unheard of oxymoron.

CREATED: [2022-04-25 Mon 11:40]

Ingredients: 1 cup (250 ml) all purpose flour (= plain flour) 1/2 cup (125 ml) Elmer's Glue/ Wood Glue 1 tsp olive/ cooking oil and gradually add it up to 1 table spoon (if needed) 1 tsp or more (as needed) moisturizer/ hand & body lotion 1 tsp vinegar 1 tsp baking powder (optional) -> It's not necessary actually. 1/2 cup (125 ml) water 1/3 cup (80 ml) corn flour/ corn starch 1/3 cup (80 ml) all purpose flour (= plain flour) First of all, mix item number 1 to 6 in the bowl. (note: after making few batches, I realize that baking powder is not necessary. You can skip this). Add water and mix with all ingredients in the bowl Note: you can use electric mixer if you have it but only for few seconds/ fast because the longer you mix the clay with mixer, the softer it becomes.  Then, add corn flour/ cornstarch - mix with spoon or hands - do not use mixer at this stage. Knead the clay lightly. The clay is stretchy at this stage but will be too soft to use. Finally, add the flour again (item number 9) and knead the clay for few minutes with hands (update: Don't need 15 minutes though).  Stop when the clay smooth and pliable.  Your hands will tell you when the clay is hard enough for modelling :)

CREATED: [2022-04-21 Thu 00:25]
ID: a83f9314-5324-4a5e-8c97-a2d06fd8e242

I literally love topology so much. I’ve been playing a really fun game recently, where I’ve written almost 100 topological properties down, ranging from simple like “compact” and “connected”, to esoteric like “countably metacompact”, “angelic”, or “alexandrov”, to non-named general properties like “abelian fundamental group”, “removing a point makes the space disconnected”, “nowhere locally homeomorphic to R”, to silly – one propery is “door”, which means every subset is either open or closed.

You roll a number between about 1 and 200, and if it’s odd you take the property corresponding to that number (properties are listed out with the odd numbers), and if it’s even, you take the negation of the property beneath it. Write this down. Roll again. Now you have a new property! If this property contradicts your previous property, prove it. If this property is implied by your previous property, prove it. And if this property is neither implied nor contradictory, prove THAT by coming up with an example that has and does not have the property, and add the property to your list. Roll again. Now you have to check the consistency of your new property with both the previous ones. Keep going as long as you can! You lose when you can’t figure out the answer to a property you added, but you can never FULLY lose aside from giving up, since you can always come back to it!

Good game format for any subject with a bestiary.

CREATED: [2022-04-20 Wed 20:00]

Here is an ongoing collection of readings on postcolonial theory and overlaps with feminist, gender, race, art theories. The readings range from easy-to-read to pretty academic, but there is a wide range of topics and levels.

CREATED: [2022-04-13 Wed 16:00]

CREATED: [2022-03-29 Tue 19:15]

I would tell him that the shores of hot earth I stand on are all internal terrain, and the subterranean fires are finally coming exposed to air, a portion at a time, no way of knowing beginnings or ends to the process; and trying to document my own ruin to him, over the years and bare moments of forced truth, bled from me as from a stone, I always found his responses so strange; sensible in long retrospection, but seeming to miss part of the point entirely, which was that I mystified myself and was (and am) looking for insight on myself as a subject - not hesitating over the condition of the tool in my hands.

CREATED: [2022-03-29 Tue 18:50]

More complex ogives can be derived from minimum turbulence calculations rather than geometric forms, such as the von Kármán ogive used for supersonic missiles, aircraft and ordnance.

CREATED: [2022-03-18 Fri 12:49]
ID: 852eebfe-59b8-461c-8423-d7cd1a60b6cb

I think maybe they’re saying something like that getting a virus like this usually gives you about a year’s worth of immunity before your immune system “forgets” it. I guess this makes sense in the context of eg needing COVID “booster shots” after a few months.

So one possible model is something like: once you get a disease, you’re protected for a while. There’s no particular length of time, it’s a spectrum, absent any external rhythm-setter you would end up like the tropics, where people have epidemics at random times, once a year, twice a year, whatever.

But the seasonal cycle “entrains” this rhythm (cf. the idea of a zeitgeber). It offers a good way for everyone’s inconsistently-and-gradually-declining immunity to get below the threshold where an epidemic can start at the same time.

So in the tropics, Florida, and Alaska, epidemics “want” to follow a cycle of coming approximately once a year. In the tropics, nothing is giving them that cycle, so they come at a random time once a year, or twice a year, or whatever. In Florida, UV light, temperature, etc provide that cycle, and they come once a year. In Alaska, UV light, temperature, etc also provide that cycle, and they come once a year independent of what’s going on in Florida. It’s like the saying about how you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the other hikers. July in Alaska doesn’t have to outrun January in Florida, it just has to outrun January in Alaska, for the dubious honor of when Alaska’s destined-to-be-once-a-year flu season is going to be.

CREATED: [2021-12-10 Fri 14:19]
ID: e54fb968-0ffb-415e-94d7-09c09e05e867

CREATED: [2021-12-10 Fri 14:19]
ID: 75bce744-e555-46ff-8a55-30d2f97f986e

CREATED: [2022-03-17 Thu 17:38]
ID: c6b87175-4379-445c-8d42-8076668b0120

The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомо́р, romanized: Holodomor, IPA: [ɦolodoˈmɔr];[2] derived from морити голодом, moryty holodom, 'to kill by starvation'),[a][3][4][5] also known as the Terror-Famine[6][7][8] or the Great Famine,[9] was a famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The term Holodomor emphasises the famine's man-made and allegedly intentional aspects such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs and restriction of population movement. As a large part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country, millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine.[10] Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine[11] and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.[12]

CREATED: [2022-03-17 Thu 10:46]
ID: d134fef7-c837-4562-8191-a45ac11e42df

[2022-03-17 Thu 10:48] <- justification logics and the geach axiom

Peter Geach proposed the axiom scheme ◊□X→□◊X◊◻X→◻◊X. When added to axiomatic S4S4 it yields an interesting logic known as S4.2S4.2. Semantically, Geach’s scheme imposes confluence on frames. That is, if two possible worlds, w1w1 and w2w2 are accessible from the same world w0w0, there is a common world w4w4 accessible from both w1w1 and w2w2. Geach’s scheme was generalized in Lemmon and Scott (1977) and a corresponding notation was introduced: Gk,l,m,nGk,l,m,n is the scheme ◊k□lX→□m◊nX◊k◻lX→◻m◊nX, where k,l,m,n≥0k,l,m,n≥0. Semantically these schemes correspond to generalized versions of confluence. Some people have begun referring to the schemes as Geach schemes, and we will follow this practice. More generally, we will call a modal logic a Geach logic if it can be axiomatized by adding a finite set of Geach schemes to KK.

CREATED: [2022-03-17 Thu 10:01]
ID: 4e5b0dbf-3ace-4472-b5e2-c1c86dd3fd0a

[2022-03-17 Thu 10:48] -> Justification Logic (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

As far as I can remember / tell upon reread, the geach axiom attempts to encode confluence.

• it was originally written for justification logics
• it says something about physics that was discussed in MLOP
• it seems like it might express anaphora resolution also

So, I want to look into it.

CREATED: [2022-03-15 Tue 22:22]
ID: 27a2a0df-da0e-4dea-a2a4-0a849a607ef1

In combinatorics, the union-closed sets conjecture is an elementary problem, posed by Péter Frankl in 1979 and still open. A family of sets is said to be union-closed if the union of any two sets from the family remains in the family. The conjecture states:

For every finite union-closed family of finite sets, other than the family containing only the empty set, there exists an element that belongs to at least half of the sets in the family.

Look at this later

CREATED: [2022-02-27 Sun 17:55]

CREATED: [2022-02-22 Tue 13:52]
ID: 327bb6a1-6ac7-46fd-82e8-0ee39ea97329

I often get asked if it is possible to turn a blank sheet of printer paper that is fountain pen friendly, such as the HP 32lb Premium Choice Laser. A simple solution would be to print rulings (lines, graph, or dot) onto their paper of choice.

Personally, I print different rulings onto printer paper all the time, just for the versatility and cheapness of printer paper compared to other papers like Rhodia and Clairfontaine.

For all those out there that also want to print different rulings onto their papers, I’ve created a bunch of “ready-to-print” sheets of paper with a bunch of different rulings and spacings. Each PDF file below contains a two-sided “ready-to-print” document with the same ruling on both sides of the paper. I have included the popular US Letter size (8.5” x 11”) and the European A4 size (21cm x 29.7cm).

All templates have light gray lines with a border on the left and right sides of 0.3mm.

CREATED: [2022-02-22 Tue 13:34]
ID: f78b5a58-9498-409a-a363-a1c608802a80

Fountain is one of Duchamp’s most famous works and is widely seen as an icon of twentieth-century art. The original, which is lost, consisted of a standard urinal, usually presented on its back for exhibition purposes rather than upright, and was signed and dated ‘R. Mutt 1917’. Tate’s work is a 1964 replica and is made from glazed earthenware painted to resemble the original porcelain. The signature is reproduced in black paint. Fountain has been seen as a quintessential example, along with Duchamp’s Bottle Rack 1914, of what he called a ‘readymade’, an ordinary manufactured object designated by the artist as a work of art (and, in Duchamp’s case, interpreted in some way).

Duchamp later recalled that the idea for Fountain arose from a discussion with the collector Walter Arensberg (1878–1954) and the artist Joseph Stella (1877–1946) in New York. He purchased a urinal from a sanitary ware supplier and submitted it – or arranged for it to be submitted – as an artwork by ‘R. Mutt’ to the newly established Society of Independent Artists that Duchamp himself had helped found and promote on the lines of the Parisian Salon des Indépendants (Duchamp had moved from Paris to New York in 1915). The society’s board of directors, who were bound by the Society’s constitution to accept all members’ submissions, took exception to Fountain, believing that a piece of sanitary ware – and one associated with bodily waste – could not be considered a work of art and furthermore was indecent (presumably, although this was not said, if displayed to women). Following a discussion and a vote, the directors present during the installation of the show at the Grand Central Palace (about ten of them according to a report in the New York Herald) narrowly decided on behalf of the board to exclude the submission from the Society’s inaugural exhibition that opened to the public on 10 April 1917. Arensberg and Duchamp resigned in protest against the board taking it upon itself to veto and effectively censor an artist’s work.

This was no small matter. The idea of having a jury-free exhibition of contemporary art had become invested with the aspirations of many in the art world for New York to become a dynamic artistic centre that would rival and even outstrip Paris. Duchamp, as head of the hanging committee, had already signaled the democratic ethos of the new Society by proposing that works should be hung by the artists’ last names (in alphabetical order) rather than according to the subjective views and preferences of one or more individuals. With the support of some backers, he and his close friends Henri-Pierre Roché (1879–1959) and Beatrice Wood (1892–1998) produced the first dada periodical in New York, titled pointedly the Blindman, on the first day of the show in part to celebrate (and in part to observe and comment upon) ‘the birth of the Independence of Art in America’ (Henri-Pierre Roché, ‘The Blind Man’, Blindman, no.1, 10 April 1917, p.3). There was therefore a good deal at stake in the decision of the board to defend a particular conception of art at the expense of departing from its own much advertised policy of ‘no jury – no prizes’. Responding to press interest in the affair, the board issued a statement defending its position: ‘The Fountain may be a very useful object in its place, but its place is not in an art exhibition and it is, by no definition, a work of art.’ (Naumann 2012, p.72.)

CREATED: [2022-02-22 Tue 13:32]
ID: 66da3013-dd65-4644-aa36-dcda753d6e1e

ZeroTier is a smart programmable Ethernet switch for planet Earth. It allows all networked devices, VMs, containers, and applications to communicate as if they all reside in the same physical data center or cloud region.

This is accomplished by combining a cryptographically addressed and secure peer to peer network (termed VL1) with an Ethernet emulation layer somewhat similar to VXLAN (termed VL2). Our VL2 Ethernet virtualization layer includes advanced enterprise SDN features like fine grained access control rules for network micro-segmentation and security monitoring.

All ZeroTier traffic is encrypted end-to-end using secret keys that only you control. Most traffic flows peer to peer, though we offer free (but slow) relaying for users who cannot establish peer to peer connections.

The goals and design principles of ZeroTier are inspired by among other things the original Google BeyondCorp paper and the Jericho Forum with its notion of "deperimeterization."

CREATED: [2022-02-22 Tue 13:29]
ID: 694ec66b-6c6b-4df1-bd65-adc9c3cac33c

In the afternoons, Mark would mope from his bedroom to the living room, where he turned on Netflix. When the weight of invisible agony pressed hard enough on his eyelids, he’d pass out. Some days, I’d come home at 6pm to find him can’t-even-wake-him-up sleeping on the couch. Later, we discovered that he was taking emergency-room-grade anxiety medications every morning, and drowning himself to sleep with Heineken, always a Heineken, in the evening. Ironically, he was writing his PhD thesis on tobacco addiction treatment, and sadly, it wasn’t curing his own addiction. He was caught between the rock of loneliness and the hard place of an evaporating bank account. Slowly, his anxiety turned into a gloomy depression — not sadness, but a bland disposition where he didn’t feel anything.

He was also late on his rent. He never spoke about friends, and once, he came home with bruises and a broken arm from a seizure. 

And yet, as his life spiraled into chaos, he stayed apparently calm. It wasn’t a Stoic, powerful calmness. It was a helpless calm, where nothing was worth doing because the world was too difficult. Perhaps he was allergic to people. He was so burdened by life, and so overwhelmed by his thesis, that the only thing he wanted to do was “veg out” and kill time.

At some point, it occurred to me that there’s a Mark in all of us — a person who can’t confront the challenges of the modern world and can’t resist the allure of distractions from it. A person who is cynical about everything because pessimism requires no imagination. A person so paralyzed by the tyranny of judgement that they close the door, retreat to the couch, and watch others live their lives on TV instead of walking the pavement themselves. And whenever that person surfaces, so does the desire to kill time. 

Witnessing a breakdown from the outside - and the alienation it causes.

CREATED: [2022-02-21 Mon 18:05]

As Aaron (not his real name) told Aviv: ‘What happens if there’s some truth to your delusion? What if it is tied to reality?… They don’t want you to come up with mythical explanations. So they keep telling you over and over again that it’s just your brain’ (44).

See Fifth Child, Doris Lessing.

CREATED: [2022-02-21 Mon 10:15]

CREATED: [2022-02-18 Fri 16:48]
ID: 967d1294-f577-4f6a-bf95-a60db8fb7884

HOw do I not have this bookmarked and archived

CREATED: [2021-12-10 Fri 14:22]
ID: 8970a066-e83c-4935-91b3-9125fd18a165

> At this moment the undertones, the gradual gathering of some days' uncomprehended dread, coalesced for Laurie into a terrible certainty. He didn't attempt to speak. The absolute impotence of childhood crushed him like the weight of the pyramids. His throat swelled; his face, squared like his father's under his mother's hair, grew crimson; the first silent tears burst out, followed by the first, most painful sob. The pressure rose in him, working towards the raging rebellious grief of the man-child who seeks in sound and fury for the strength of a man.

CREATED: [2021-12-10 Fri 14:22]
ID: 4f191b69-5bd4-4adb-a79d-35f8569053bb

CREATED: [2021-12-10 Fri 14:22]
ID: d6848171-c270-47c7-a3ea-35ea3e05dca9

CREATED: [2021-12-10 Fri 14:22]
ID: 4c186321-91ce-4667-a447-1402f649f71a

CREATED: [2021-09-24 Fri 14:14]
ID: 3cd72f8f-80df-400e-bffb-64e590d8443d

We are SIPTA, the Society for Imprecise Probabilities: Theories and Applications, and we are convinced that there is more to uncertainty than probabilities. There is much more, in fact. Would you like to use probabilities but don’t know their exact values? Or would you like to model uncertainty without any probabilities at all? Know then that there are numerous mathematical models that can measure chance or uncertainty without sharp numerical probabilities. We refer to these as imprecise probabilities.



Would you like to know more? Do you work on these topics but don’t know the community that well? SIPTA aims to connect you to the right people, direct you to relevant events, and provide you with basic information and resources. Make sure to subscribe to our mailing list, and hopefully we’ll see each other at SIPTA’s next conference or school.

CREATED: [2021-09-22 Wed 18:31]

III
Earth, receive an honoured guest;
William Yeats is laid to rest:
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well,

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your uinconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the framing of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

CREATED: [2021-09-22 Wed 17:52]

CREATED: [2021-09-20 Mon 23:52]
ID: 14b50f52-c3a4-431a-a449-5f700c334986

Etymology[edit] From an earlier verb form of nonplus, from Latin nōn plūs (“no more, no further”), early 1600s.[1][2] The etymological sense is similar to being left speechless as a result of confusion: the person can say or do "no more".

Pronunciation[edit] (UK) IPA(key): nɒnˈplʌst (General American) IPA(key): nɑnˈplʌst Rhymes: -ʌst Audio (UK) MENU0:00 Adjective[edit] nonplussed (comparative more nonplussed, superlative most nonplussed)

Bewildered; unsure how to respond or act. [from 17th c.] quotations ▼ (proscribed, US, informal) Unfazed, unaffected, or unimpressed. [from 20th c.] quotations ▼ Usage notes[edit] In recent North American English nonplussed has acquired the alternative meaning of "unimpressed".[1] In 1999, this was considered a neologism, ostensibly from "not plussed", although "plussed" is itself a nonstandard word, seemingly a back-formation from nonplussed. The "unimpressed" meaning is proscribed as nonstandard by Ask Oxford.[3]

Synonyms[edit] (bewildered): perplexed, vexed, thwarted, frustrated, foiled, confounded

CREATED: [2021-09-15 Wed 12:54]
ID: 054ff647-6101-40d3-ad99-f61a5e3e1997

CREATED: [2021-09-15 Wed 12:54]
ID: 9f2d1fcd-79b1-445c-814e-eb29ffbed56e

Take a market and try to create the eigen-agent whose behaviour is the simplest possible factorization of incentives in the market. If coordination is cheap, these will not be individual buyers or sellers, but cadres of them. Or: agents by division, instead of coalitions by addition.

CREATED: [2021-09-15 Wed 12:50]
ID: e5baa0a2-b612-40d3-9621-7ff25cae34ce

So, SPEW exists

CREATED: [2021-09-11 Sat 16:01]
ID: fdb90f36-3709-4f91-9c82-a5039665d3c8

I wish for nothing but to be by your side, And that you don't wish it does not hurt my pride. It doesn't make me lonely, I was always alone It doesn't make me sad, for I'm sad on my own. Yet what pain is this, that shapes my breath into sighs? Why this new longing for impossible things? I haven't been cheated: nothing was traded nor earned, But what a cruel world it is, where love can be spurned. I wish for nothing but to hear you again, I knew that I would from the moment I heard, I still feel the lack I began feeling then, The hole in me echoing back every word. So: was I made aware of what was already there? Or had I been hollowed, for what wouldn't remain? The love your throat made to the quivering air: I can trap the mere sounds, and release them again, I can catch the mere patterns of light in your eyes, I can read your words over from the page where they lie, But their color and flavor all taste like my sighs. What a cruel world it is, where those we love die.

CREATED: [2021-08-31 Tue 12:50]
ID: 2ecacd29-b69a-42af-a094-115f6348ba13

CREATED: [2021-08-31 Tue 12:45]
ID: 32cf9970-b65d-45da-8737-8e3d5bdca3ef

Network motifs are recurrent and statistically significant subgraphs or patterns of a larger graph. All networks, including biological networks, social networks, technological networks (e.g., computer networks and electrical circuits) and more, can be represented as graphs, which include a wide variety of subgraphs.

Network motifs are sub-graphs that repeat themselves in a specific network or even among various networks. Each of these sub-graphs, defined by a particular pattern of interactions between vertices, may reflect a framework in which particular functions are achieved efficiently. Indeed, motifs are of notable importance largely because they may reflect functional properties. They have recently gathered much attention as a useful concept to uncover structural design principles of complex networks.[1] Although network motifs may provide a deep insight into the network's functional abilities, their detection is computationally challenging.

Much experimental work has been devoted to understanding network motifs in gene regulatory networks. These networks control which genes are expressed in the cell in response to biological signals. The network is defined such that genes are nodes, and directed edges represent the control of one gene by a transcription factor (regulatory protein that binds DNA) encoded by another gene. Thus, network motifs are patterns of genes regulating each other's transcription rate. When analyzing transcription networks, it is seen that the same network motifs appear again and again in diverse organisms from bacteria to human. The transcription network of E. coli and yeast, for example, is made of three main motif families, that make up almost the entire network. The leading hypothesis is that the network motif were independently selected by evolutionary processes in a converging manner,[45][46] since the creation or elimination of regulatory interactions is fast on evolutionary time scale, relative to the rate at which genes change,[45][46][47] Furthermore, experiments on the dynamics generated by network motifs in living cells indicate that they have characteristic dynamical functions. This suggests that the network motif serve as building blocks in gene regulatory networks that are beneficial to the organism.

The functions associated with common network motifs in transcription networks were explored and demonstrated by several research projects both theoretically and experimentally. Below are some of the most common network motifs and their associated function.

Negative auto-regulation (NAR)[edit]

Schematic representation of an auto-regulation motif One of simplest and most abundant network motifs in E. coli is negative auto-regulation in which a transcription factor (TF) represses its own transcription. This motif was shown to perform two important functions. The first function is response acceleration. NAR was shown to speed-up the response to signals both theoretically [48] and experimentally. This was first shown in a synthetic transcription network[49] and later on in the natural context in the SOS DNA repair system of E. coli.[50] The second function is increased stability of the auto-regulated gene product concentration against stochastic noise, thus reducing variations in protein levels between different cells.[51][52][53]

Positive auto-regulation (PAR)[edit] Positive auto-regulation (PAR) occurs when a transcription factor enhances its own rate of production. Opposite to the NAR motif this motif slows the response time compared to simple regulation.[54] In the case of a strong PAR the motif may lead to a bimodal distribution of protein levels in cell populations.[55]

Feed-forward loops (FFL)[edit]

Schematic representation of a Feed-forward motif This motif is commonly found in many gene systems and organisms. The motif consists of three genes and three regulatory interactions. The target gene C is regulated by 2 TFs A and B and in addition TF B is also regulated by TF A . Since each of the regulatory interactions may either be positive or negative there are possibly eight types of FFL motifs.[56] Two of those eight types: the coherent type 1 FFL (C1-FFL) (where all interactions are positive) and the incoherent type 1 FFL (I1-FFL) (A activates C and also activates B which represses C) are found much more frequently in the transcription network of E. coli and yeast than the other six types.[56][57] In addition to the structure of the circuitry the way in which the signals from A and B are integrated by the C promoter should also be considered. In most of the cases the FFL is either an AND gate (A and B are required for C activation) or OR gate (either A or B are sufficient for C activation) but other input function are also possible.

Coherent type 1 FFL (C1-FFL)[edit] The C1-FFL with an AND gate was shown to have a function of a ‘sign-sensitive delay’ element and a persistence detector both theoretically [56] and experimentally[58] with the arabinose system of E. coli. This means that this motif can provide pulse filtration in which short pulses of signal will not generate a response but persistent signals will generate a response after short delay. The shut off of the output when a persistent pulse is ended will be fast. The opposite behavior emerges in the case of a sum gate with fast response and delayed shut off as was demonstrated in the flagella system of E. coli.[59] De novo evolution of C1-FFLs in gene regulatory networks has been demonstrated computationally in response to selection to filter out an idealized short signal pulse, but for non-idealized noise, a dynamics-based system of feed-forward regulation with different topology was instead favored.[60]

Incoherent type 1 FFL (I1-FFL)[edit] The I1-FFL is a pulse generator and response accelerator. The two signal pathways of the I1-FFL act in opposite directions where one pathway activates Z and the other represses it. When the repression is complete this leads to a pulse-like dynamics. It was also demonstrated experimentally that the I1-FFL can serve as response accelerator in a way which is similar to the NAR motif. The difference is that the I1-FFL can speed-up the response of any gene and not necessarily a transcription factor gene.[61] An additional function was assigned to the I1-FFL network motif: it was shown both theoretically and experimentally that the I1-FFL can generate non-monotonic input function in both a synthetic [62] and native systems.[63] Finally, expression units that incorporate incoherent feedforward control of the gene product provide adaptation to the amount of DNA template and can be superior to simple combinations of constitutive promoters.[64] Feedforward regulation displayed better adaptation than negative feedback, and circuits based on RNA interference were the most robust to variation in DNA template amounts.[64]

Multi-output FFLs[edit] In some cases the same regulators X and Y regulate several Z genes of the same system. By adjusting the strength of the interactions this motif was shown to determine the temporal order of gene activation. This was demonstrated experimentally in the flagella system of E. coli.[65]

Single-input modules (SIM)[edit] This motif occurs when a single regulator regulates a set of genes with no additional regulation. This is useful when the genes are cooperatively carrying out a specific function and therefore always need to be activated in a synchronized manner. By adjusting the strength of the interactions it can create temporal expression program of the genes it regulates.[66]

In the literature, Multiple-input modules (MIM) arose as a generalization of SIM. However, the precise definitions of SIM and MIM have been a source of inconsistency. There are attempts to provide orthogonal definitions for canonical motifs in biological networks and algorithms to enumerate them, especially SIM, MIM and Bi-Fan (2x2 MIM).[67]

Dense overlapping regulons (DOR)[edit] This motif occurs in the case that several regulators combinatorially control a set of genes with diverse regulatory combinations. This motif was found in E. coli in various systems such as carbon utilization, anaerobic growth, stress response and others.[17][22] In order to better understand the function of this motif one has to obtain more information about the way the multiple inputs are integrated by the genes. Kaplan et al.[68] has mapped the input functions of the sugar utilization genes in E. coli, showing diverse shapes.

CREATED: [2021-08-30 Mon 00:58]

CREATED: [2021-08-28 Sat 19:59]
ID: bbb2c1e8-1c4a-4be1-91a8-66efeb96f8e7

CREATED: [2021-08-26 Thu 23:00]

Take a pot, and love it well -
A cushion, napkin, fork or spoon -
The curtain you part to see the moon -
The lamp you light to see the foolish things you're writing as you write
The surface you are sitting on, when you do this in the night.
  The foolishness of things is like the foolishness of written words,
A simple rearrangement of things you've seen and heard
    In other places, other rooms.
What you mean now when you say "mine"
To a new-made thing upon your page, or
    A pretty something on your shelf
    Is the shell you draw, the thing called self
    Around the things you'll use again.
Words on a page are nobody's until they're read, and read again;
Again, again, until the thing you are is them, or is them too.
  To hide from this becoming, what we say is they belong to you.

CREATED: [2021-08-26 Thu 18:00]

"If I do X the desired signal Y increases".

Does X cause Y because Y-emitters desired X a priori and are strategically emitting Y to receive more of it, or because the X-action changes Y-emitters such that they emit more Y?

The latter model is more general and there is no reason to allow the additional detail in the explanation that omits the epicycles.

"But my model is simpler that way!" isn't actually acceptable unless you are in the middle of developing a model that actually explains things.

CREATED: [2021-08-23 Mon 12:47]

This document defines a dictionary for using Plover with Emacs. Explanations of concepts and rationale are provided for each set of entries. Basic familiarity with Plover and Emacs is assumed. If you're not familiar with Plover and want to learn it, visit the Plover wiki. To get started with Emacs, check out the guided tour.

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āṭāntarā High quality Carnatic music notation

CREATED: [2021-07-18 Sun 01:20]

Its streets ring with my lack
And when the children wake to the bells that ring, they
Look out to the sea, where once my lover
Went away, away, and when I wake, I look beneath
Myself a sword, the sea my sheath
My eyes submerged, my yawning teeth
That children play on off the streets
They hear my calls in morning bells
For love I've wept for, long and loud
"come back, come back!" - I was once proud
The sea became my prideless shroud.
My love is deep, and here I float
The city on my back's a child on which I dote
To be their boat, I stay between
The air the sea, the blue and green
And call out loud, come back to me
Don't stray so far out in the sea
But my love can't or will not hear, for what they love is being free.

CREATED: [2021-07-15 Thu 12:06]

CREATED: [2021-07-14 Wed 10:43]

Yellow and blue
Sweet or sour
Not now!

CREATED: [2021-07-14 Wed 10:43]

Cliche when it was written
They say our story's old 'cause we're young
An inevitable disaster
They just wish it happened faster
Cover their ears until the fat lady has su-u-ung

But it's our life, and this is the moment that it's at
And the light in your hair - who would ever argue with that?
These cynical spectators would give anything to be back in my shoes
Or have my eyes for when I'm looking at you

It's only an act, but I'll act my heart out on this stage
It's just a chapter but I'm savoring every page
I'll grow out of it, but it's a story for the a-ages
How I feel for you how you feel for me
This momentary, shimmering symmetry

CREATED: [2021-07-13 Tue 12:05]

CREATED: [2021-07-12 Mon 22:53]

Taleb derives from this that the price and the reality (or even worse, the economic theory) are not the same thing. You can predict war and still not realize that it necessarily means a rise in oil. You can know everything about Switzerland, and have no advantage (or be at a disadvantage owing to overconfidence and spurious details) when it comes to trading francs.

VI. Against the Predictors

Taleb derives a great error in thought from Aquinas, quoting Averroes, “An agent does not move except out of intention for an end.”

So let us call here the teleological fallacy the illusion that you know exactly where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.

Knowing where you are going seems a pretty valuable skill. If you’re planning a trip you’d like to have an itinerary. If you’re running a business, you’d like to have a business plan.

Compare sam zdat The Uruk Machine – sam[ ]zdat Add Nassim Taleb to the reading list

CREATED: [2021-07-12 Mon 22:41]

Shining dimly out the windows, that you know but can hardly believe is there; and that inflection point of awareness off which you, the reader, fall, forgetting as you remembered. What a good thing this book is here, you might think, in my hands a static thing, able to cast the same spell on me should I read it again. And so you do, and it will be similar but not the same, not the first time, where you didn't see it coming; it's different when you know it's there, your impatience of a different kind.

CREATED: [2021-07-12 Mon 22:41]

CREATED: [2021-07-12 Mon 22:41]

Why shove your way into a corner or out of a corner, into the middle,
Where uninvited, where regretted, where reconsidered
Inviting consideration onto oneself
(it now cannot but be the self, needing defence
(The only defence against rudeness is personality))
It's rude.
A word we use to confuse the rude, because all it means is something a human hasn't touched yet,
But what we're saying is that we don't want to touch the thing ourselves.
Obtruding is waiting, out convexly in space,
For others' vexation to subside, so they may consider you properly. As a strategy it seems
Horrendously vulnerable.
Demanding, really,
Well, obtrusive.
I would never want to do it.

CREATED: [2021-07-02 Fri 00:05]

sos, mayday, scream au secours you're catchin on fire, I'm slammin the doors I'll take all your mone to keep a bit more You're on your knees but I'm on all fours

CREATED: [2021-05-03 Mon 20:03]

Hence, Polanyi observes a paradox: contemporary writers all note that poverty is increasing, that the poverty observed is much worse than anything before, and that it all seemed to coincide with the Industrial Revolution. And yet the best economic estimates all point out that everyone – not merely the rich – was actually richer than before. The paradox vanishes once you realize that “richer” means only in terms of wages, and that the full range of wealth that existed before is not taken into account. Polanyi calls this “the economic prejudice”.

ID: 5582fd89-746a-4d4e-88b5-624928b3a394

CREATED: [2020-08-11 Tue 20:48]
ID: a92c364a-46e6-49b7-acad-6e8f0b5bafe4

old title: dissent is individual, which is why collective negations can only happen through the frankly roundabout mechanism of taboo.

Saying "no" acknowledges the thing you're responding to as having enough weight to be noticed in the first place. "No" is a transformation that just doesn't survive intact through the transmission and lensing of the collective illusion. This fact is there, buried in the reflexive mistrust of protest, in the invitation to suspicion being inescapably double-edged as a rhetorical tool…"no" invites pruning, it invites criticality and logic, the exercise of reasoning over priors, and being the purest, most effective tool for the generation of powerful (useful, correct, effective, unpredicatable, unsimulable, fearsome) ideas that we have, is therefore much, much cheaper for an individual, and less risky, than it could ever be for a society. The mechanism of taboo, therefore, functions as an attempt at inoculation. It's an act of name-stealing, or dilution, of confusion. If you want certain things not to be thought, these roundabout mechanisms are all that you could hope to see working.

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“Being so ugly,” she continues calmly, as though this makes perfect sense, “I wanted to change myself so thoroughly that others would look to me on stage and say: how far Lilia Baranovskaya has come.” A pause then, carefully timed. “Katsuki. Do you think this made me prima ballerina?” The obvious answer is yes, because Lillia had been.

“Something else?” Yuuri asks, unsteady.

“When I became prima ballerina,” she says, “it was because they would look to me on stage and say: who is that beautiful monster.” She comes to him, tilts his chin up in unshaking, perfect hands. “Destroy your past self, and only use the beautiful pieces. Every time you take the stage you are a new man, Katsuki Yuuri, with something new to prove.” Her eyes, burning on his. “We do not let old lives dance with us.”

Redemption does not exist. There is only rebirth.

CREATED: <2021-04-23 Fri 17:36>

Two lovers meet, and cry for a week, without stopping, into their pillows as they sleep, salting their meals as they eat. Still weeping, they marry. The marriage bed becomes soaked, as if left out in the rain. And once they slept that night, the thears stopped, and when they woke up the next morning they had cried out all the sadness of seventeen years and felt perfectly happy from then until the end of their days. Hopeful lovers will leave their bedroom windows open, that lovers might bless their bed with rain; and a marriage bed might, by the romantic or the very old, be blessed with saltwater.

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What is it you need of me?
If I could I'd find a way to give it, so you'd leave, and stop this
Asking after things I'd rather leave beneath the dust you found them in.



Dress me, then, in dust of attics
Shelves above the kitchen shelves
Where we keep our Occasional Selves
Like Traveler or Murderer.

Dry me in the summer sun,
Pleasure in its fullest bloom
Is punishment in winter rooms.
Breathe, and weep, and shed your fear.


Transmute pain out of our fun,
Perhaps that's far enough you've run.

CREATED: <2021-04-23 Fri 17:36>

I put in X->Y sentences I get out potential orders of operation. Could be easy enough to write in orgmode or elisp at minimum Input `dot`, output order types or a org-spreadsheet table of dependency sentences.

CREATED: <2021-04-23 Fri 17:36>

recc from that new coworking discord I joined, relating to the FIRO model. quote:

Ran across a model yesterday called FIRO (Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation) that grades people on three metrics: Inclusion, Control, and Openness.

On a scale of 0 to 9, how much do you want other people to include you (keep you in the loop with emails, invite you to parties, chat with you just for fun, ask for your input before making a decision, etc)? How much do you like to include other people?

On a scale of 0 to 9, how much do you want other people to control your work (guide your activities, help you schedule, select your priorities, decide how you achieve your goals, etc)? How much do you want to control other people?

On a scale of 0 to 9, how much do you want to share with other people about yourself (talk about your feelings, hopes, fears, doubts, share details about your life, etc)? How much do you want others to be open with you? I only encountered this yesterday, and have done no more research than what's in the summary in this book, so I have no idea how well it holds up beyond the author's reassurance that it does, nor how it may have been misused by managers through the ages. But what I like about it is that it explains a mystery about myself I've been struggling with for a while: it explains my wildly varying sociability scores.

In most models I've seen, openness and inclusion are lumped together into some overarching "extraversion" or "people-person" sort of metric, and then both I and other people end up very confused about who I am and what I want. But by splitting them out, it becomes quite clear.

The typical bro-friendship in Hollywood right now, for instance, is high-inclusion and low-openness: you wanna hang out with your buddies all the time, but you never want the conversation to get into anything icky like emotions and stuff. You'll often see female friendships portrayed as high-inclusion and high-openness: gal-pals will get together, paint their fingernails, and talk about everything from their digestive tract to how good their partner is in bed.

In this model, I'm high-openness and low-inclusion: I'm happy to talk about whatever, and I don't mind going as deep and as vulnerable as anyone wants, but I just don't feel the need to be involved very much no matter what the topic of discussion. I'll hop in if I feel like the group is missing something important, but if everything's flowing nicely then I prefer to sit on the sidelines. If we're working on a project together, and there's a decision to be made that clearly falls within your purview, then I don't feel the need to tell you how to do it – just make the decision and tell me what you decided. I like hanging out in spaces like this, but I don't want to be one of the most active members, I don't want to run tea time, I don't want to be a moderator or to have special permissions. I like lurking. And that probably explains, more than any other factor, why my mental and spiritual health are doing fine after 9 months of lockdown with no end in sight: I just don't like going to parties that much. I don't need to be face-to-face to experience the level of inclusion I want. I can get all my needs met from Discord and Zoom. And as another consequence, the productivity gain from hermit mode is well worth it: I get to do the things I want to do AND I get to work by myself. My suspicion , Sri, is that you are high-inclusion, and therefore hermit-mode productivity is fraught with tension: You want to get things done, because that makes you happy, but blocking yourself off from other people makes you unhappy. You want to hang out with people because that makes you happy, but it stops you creating things at the level you want to. And so you end up stuck in this middle place where you can't be fully happy no matter what you decide.

CREATED: <2021-04-23 Fri 17:36>

More than "enough", going by feeling. Abundant. Depression and wrongdoing and desire and suffering are all a distraction from that truth. Facing that truth is difficult, because it makes me feel undeserving. Or naive. Or foolish. It is hard to create a life or live a life that lives up to that much joy. And desire is a lot of fun. Maybe I want to hang around here, feeling this feeling, and finding a life that fits it, for awhile longer.

CREATED: <2021-04-23 Fri 17:36>

Think of DNA and reimplementation. Question: how often on average are things reimplemented in DNA? Program durability is one thing, but

existing code is used to solve the problem / existing code is capable of solving the problem

Edit distance efficiency, tentatively

Is quite another. I'd be interested to see

• good ways to measure that
• good ways to improve it
• how DNA performs on that scale.

Also, reading the deductive uncertainty paper would really help right about now, since it hooks up real nice.

(Above notes sparked from Samo Burja, Functional Institutions are the Exception.)

CREATED: <2021-04-23 Fri 17:36>

Our happy cat capture story is worth it here

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apparently very game of thrones esque

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Saying "no" acknowledges the thing you're responding to as having enough weight to be noticed in the first place. "No" is a transformation that just doesn't survive intact through the transmission and lensing of the collective illusion. This fact is there, buried in the reflexive mistrust of protest, in the invitation to suspicion being inescapably double-edged as a rhetorical tool…"no" invites pruning, it invites criticality and logic, the exercise of reasoning over priors, and being the purest, most effective tool for the generation of powerful (useful, correct, effective, unpredicatable, unsimulable, fearsome) ideas that we have, is therefore much, much cheaper for an individual, and less risky, than it could ever be for a society. The mechanism of taboo, therefore, functions as an attempt at inoculation. It's an act of name-stealing, or dilution, of confusion. If you want certain things not to be thought, these roundabout mechanisms are all that you could hope to see working.

CREATED: <2021-04-23 Fri 17:36>

Leaf in the middle and glass on the left
(You eat with your right hand and ought to sip water
Though everybody disagrees on just how and when)
Salt isn't asked about, sweet's always yes
The rest of it, you can try to say yes or no
And there's rules about everything that you won't know
But the grandmother next to you (grandfather's at
The head of the table, and we wait for him to eat)
Will make sure you follow them and explain if she's nice.
You're lost, and you'd drown, without this advice.
Later, when you realize that they laughed when you sprinkled
The water round your plate like you'd seen them all do
Because imitation doesn't work when the rule's just for you
And your grandmother's in the kitchen, eating after she serves
Not how the only girl child of her generation would
If she could be quiet, and appear to be good.
When the womenfolk eat, I lay out their food
The salt and the sweet and all of the rest
And they say yes or no based on what they like best.

CREATED: <2021-04-23 Fri 17:36>

• veggie box
• sauce box
• roti box
• rice box
• pappu box (vegan protein)
• paneer box (dairy or egg protein)
• breadbox
  • bread
  • desserts

CREATED: <2021-04-23 Fri 17:36>

3.3 Regulative and constitutive rules – Being Human in the Anthropocene

ID: 61a8b4c8-c74c-4253-bffe-2074952e09ae

ID: 76537757-7a3f-4aab-b7d5-81a6a355f8a6

find and read obsolete by chuck pahalnuik

In a meditation on Oscar Wilde’s relationship with art, Camus considers the notion of sorrow, the exorcism of which is one of art’s seven therapeutic functions, and adds to history’s finest definitions of art:

2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png[Oscar Wilde] wanted to place art above all else. But the grandeur of art is not to rise above all. On the contrary, it must blend with all. Wilde finally understood this, thanks to sorrow. But it is the culpability of this era that it always needed sorrow and constraint in order to catch a glimpse of a truth also found in happiness, when the heart is worthy. Servile century.

In a 1956 letter to a hospitalized friend, Camus explores how body and mind conspire in sorrow and happiness:

2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe solidarity of bodies, unity at the center of the mortal and suffering flesh. This is what we are and nothing else. We are this plus human genius in all its forms, from the child to Einstein.

No, … it is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life. … What you must do now is nothing more than live like everybody else. You deserve, by what you are, a happiness, a fullness that few people know. Yet today this fullness is not dead, it is a part of life and, to its credit, it reigns over you whether you want it to or not. But in the coming days you must live alone, with this hole, this painful memory. This lifelessness that we all carry inside of us — by us, I mean to say those who are not taken to the height of happiness, and who painfully remember another kind of happiness that goes beyond the memory.

Sometimes, for violent minds, the time that we tear off for work, that is torn away from time, is the best. An unfortunate passion.

Camus later revisits this osmosis between the physical and the metaphysical in a poignant reflection on our self-imposed prisons of unhappiness:

2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngIt is not true that the heart wears out — but the body creates this illusion.

Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness. If they are happy by surprise, they find themselves disabled, unhappy to be deprived of their unhappiness.

“All true happiness, as all that is truly beautiful, can only result from order,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, and yet, as Camus so stirringly reminds us, order itself, when worshiped too blindly and rigidly, can consume our fragile chance of happiness.

Complement Notebooks 1951–1959 with the story of Camus’s unlikely and extraordinary friendship with pioneering biologist Jacques Monod.

This dive into the weeds gives an up-to-date picture of what is generally considered the most central and scary challenge. Our best current AI techniques are radically opaque, current interpretability work is making very very little progress relative to the size of the challenge, and things like deception and mesa-optimizers are hopeless to address if you can’t understand your AGI’s internal cognition at all. Work on interpretability is urgently needed and is one of the things one could usefully do. 

interpretability seems like the sort of thing I should spend ten minutes thinking about to see if ten more minutes would be useful or enriching.

that fleck of sea foam you forgot
that tail and feeling scale you flay
those eyes that just won't look away
go on, ask, I'm still around
why on earth I'm still around
why I'm still around on earth
thrashing and slipping on the ground
and why I never make a sound
silent, see, I'm not a sound mind, don't ask, I don't try to lie
stay still until I'm looking right, stay down until I gain the right to generate what people say to people who will say the same and play that game until I die and fall into the sea again
I say, again, why died I not, the womb won't let me walk away
I play the game and play the game and walk the path and stay the same and change my tune and change my ways and wait for change to touch my days
I stay afraid, I stay awake, I lay awake, I count my stake,
I take and take and take and take
I fall asleep in self defense to hide from things I didn't make
Uncommon sense, uncrowded lens, no arguments, a quiet lake
I ask myself, why died I not? Wherefore is life, why life and sun?
Why do I beg, but never reach,
 for back where life had not begun?
 I've overgrown, I'm not my own
I catch and I do not release
I'm on my knees, I'm on my knees
and every single breath is grief
There's no relief there's no relief
I do not want to make a sound.
another round, another round,
I don't know why I'm still around.

"Natural" here is meant to denote (at least according to Clark) "social" and "strategic" and "Schelling point built". "formal" is meant to denote "precise". I worry that in an attempt to disambiguate we have ended up contrasting: the former usage is not best used to denote something imprecise, nor is the latter usage well understood if taken to be apurposive or asocial.

written to begin from shortly after the marriage in question

Using nix flakes with NixOS nixos-rebuild switch will read its configuration from /etc/nixos/flake.nix if it is present.

A basic nixos flake.nix could look like this:

{ outputs = { self, nixpkgs }: {

nixosConfigurations.joes-desktop = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem { system = "x86₆₄-linux"; modules = [ ./configuration.nix ]; }; }; }

Find the rocks and pick them out,
And with your fingers wear them out
Till they fall through the sieve.
Let us meet, but ten years hence,
When all the rocks have been worn small –
 we couldn't help but let them fall –
So clasp our hands, and grieve.

I will say, "remember when"–
But once we need a "which" or "when"
The thing that won't come back again
Is past - and when you say
"I do", and ask me back the same
That, too, is back the way we came
We'll come ten years and play this game,
Since we came all that way.

This idea of reverse reality distortion too, took me a while to figure out. Silicon Valley acknowledges the existence of the reality distortion field cast by the conjurers of new wealth. What it does not quite recognize is the reality distortion field that goes the other way: the theater of yes-your-plans-are-succeeding manufactured for the benefit of the leaders, so they continue trying to make the New Economy happen. It’s quite fetch.

The strongest argument I have ever seen for trying to make fetch happen.

• the scott alexander excuses post
• memetic spread degrading concept relations
• stable strategies for dealing with this shit without succmubing to correlational reasoning yourself
• an impossibility theorem for the above

,---- | (setq org-publish-project-alist | '( | ... | ("news-feed" | :base-directory "~/website/" | :base-extension "org" | :publishing-directory "~/website/" | ;; new property :publishing-url | :publishing-url "http://example.tld/~john/"; | :auto-index t | :index-filename "news.atom" | :index-title "News feed for address@hidden" | :index-function org-atom-publish-feed-index | ;; feed specific settings | :feed-id "6ea57592-69f2-4ef8-b44d-b7a511bd2fe8") | ... | )) `----

in Alex Overwijk and Mary Bourassa’s morning session at Twitter Math Camp. They have dispensed with traditional units entirely, instead teaching content through activities. An activity could last anywhere from a single class to three weeks. Each major topic in a course comes up within the first few weeks (Al called this “unloading” standards), and is spiraled a number of times before the end. Here’s what the curriculum might look like:

clickbaity but cute idea

From Middle English retracten, from Old French retracter, from Late Latin rētractō (“I undertake again; I withdraw, refuse, decline; I retract”), from Latin retractus (“withdrawn”), perfect passive participle of retrahō (“I draw or pull back, withdraw; I call back, remove”). Doublet of retreat.

doublets are so cool

Intuitionstic logic as a Heytig algebra open sets form a Heytig Algebra, which is a lattice plus an implication operator. So it's stronger than a lattice, but weaker than a boolean algebra. Formally, a Heytig algebra over a set XX is a collection (L, ∨, ∧, ⇒)(L,∨,∧,⇒) where (X, ∨, ∧)(X,∨,∧) form a lattice, and ⇒⇒ obeys the axiom ⇒: L → L; (c ∧ a) ≤ b \iff c ≤ (a ⇒ b) ⇒:L→L;(c∧a)≤b⟺c≤(a⇒b) In any topological space (U, τ)(U,τ) (UU for universe set) the open sets of that space form a Heytig algebra. Here, set-union and set-intersection become the lattice join and lattice meet. We define a "weak complement" denoted by \lnot¬ which is defined as: \lnot A ≡ \texttt{interior}(A^C)

FOR FUCKS SAKE

from Grammarly: A font walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Hey, we don't serve your type here," and then calls the serif.

Replace font-type-serif with:

• merge-sort-versioncontrol
• parentheses-bracket-punctuate(make you eat a knuckle sandwich and then barf up the)
• Nonselfcontainingset-family-operators(buncha smooth)
• Vegetablesoup-stock-heat
• deer-elk-vamoose
• fabric-felt(suspicious, so I called)-fuzz
• tree-?-cops(e)