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Riz Khan (Al Jazeera) interviews Anand: 1,2

"If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches"

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet, Letter 1

Arthur Clarke's 3rd law of prediction reads: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. "

Upon reading Dan Dennett, I would translate this as: any sufficiently advanced crane is indistinguishable from a skyhook.

Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.

-- John Milton (1608-74)Paradise Lost, I:242ff.

"¿Hay mensajeros? Sí,
cuerpo tatuado de señaleses
el espacio, el aire es invisible
tejido de llamadas y respuestas.
Animales y cosas se hacen lenguas,
a través de nosotros habla consigo mismo
el universo. Somos un fragmento
-pero cabal en su inacabamiento-
de su discurso. Solipsismo
coherente y vacío:
desde el principio del principio
¿qué dice? Dice que nos dice.
Se lo dice a sí mismo. Oh madness of discourse,
that cause sets up with and against itself!"

-- Extract from Octavio Paz's "Pasado En Claro" (A draft of shadows)



[Are there messengers? Yes,
space is a body tattooed with signs, the air
an invisible web of calls and answers
Animals and things make languages,
through us the universe talks with itself.
We are a fragment --
accomplished in our unaccomplishment --
of its discourse. A coherent
and empty solipsism:
since the beginning of the beginning
what does it say? It says that it says us.
It says it to itself. Oh madness of discourse,
that cause sets up with and against itself!

-- Translated by Eliot Weinberger ]


(The Deepak Chopra type mood is unintended)

Beating a dead cliche

Gregory Stock: To upgrade is human

Tales of Mere Existence

Procrastination
Conversation
How To Cope With Depression
Saturday
I Have To Get Ready
...Take Shoes Off?
A Typical Conversation With My Mom

Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Body and Soul: 1,2,3,4,5,6
Born Equal?: 1,2,3,4,5,6
Birth and Death: 1,2,3,4,5,6

Germaine Greer on women creating art

René Magritte. La Condition humaine. 1933. Oil on canvas.

"In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape.

...
This is how we see the world. We see it outside ourselves, and at the same time we only have a representation of it in ourselves. In the same way, we sometimes situate in the past that which is happening in the present. Time and space thus loose the vulgar meaning that only daily experience takes into account"

Chiefs, Thieves, and Priests -- Matt Ridley

"Why is it that with nothing but improvement behind us we anticipate nothing but disaster before us?" -- Lord Macaulay, 1830

One line movie summaries

I played this game with a friend on facebook. You have to summarise a movie in one sentence. Reposting my take here.

Sideways: Grape Expectations.

Asoka: King Khan gloriously emerging from bathwater to romance a thinly clad Kaurvaki, and other bollywoodian shenanigans set to a backdrop of some Kalinga claptrap.

Devdas: Alcoholic loser hangs out with dancer-types before dying pathetically amidst colorful sets.

Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gham: Stinking-rich people letting loose lachrymose family valves over family values in phoren country.

Any Seagal movie: Look at my grumpy face, I'm gonna kick yer ass, punk!

American Beauty: Pimply faced kids are about as beautiful and filmable as a free floating plastic bag before they turn into dysfunctional, materialistic, joyless grown-ups.

Any of the Die Hard movies: I'm like "duh" when it comes to anything remotely modern, but mess with my family and bam!! Duh!

Eight Mile: I'm pissed off, so I'll rap, cut some albums, make this movie and make y'all watch it.

Rocky: Underdawg beats topdawg after some incoherent grunts, setbacks and montage shots of unconventional training methods using meat and shit, yay!

The Terminator: He needs to time travel to the past so he can make babies to live in the future so that he can time travel to the past to make babies.

Arlington Road: Holy crap, the neighbors may be terrorists!

Snakes on a Plane: Snakes on a plane.

My Cousin Vinny: Whipped Italian-American fellow is a better lawyer than he is.

Thelma and Louise: Bored wimin beat the crap outta people and take off.

Spielberg speshul
-----------------
AI: Creating androids is nice, but this can soon turn into a bigass mess!
Jurassic Park: Recreating dinosaurs is nice, but this can soon turn into a bigass mess!
Minority Report: Predicting the future is nice, but this can soon turn into a bigass mess!

Napolean Dynamite: Nerdiness is next to danciness.

Sphere: All you have to sphere is sphere itself.

Eyes Wide Shut:Lust can be unpredictable, meanwhile watch this orgy.

Most of the superhero movies like superman, spiderman, daredevil, aquaman, broccoliman, batgirl, electra, catwoman, roachwoman, crappolagirl: I am so super, but I have super issues to agonize over, mmmok? boohoo! give me $9.5 and I will feel better *sniff*, *sniff*.

Groundhog Day: Groundhog day, groundhog day, groundhog day, groundhog day, groundhog day, groundhog day, groundhog day ...

Meta, the morality of Haidt

Turing writes, circa 1950

Next stop, Wonderland?

"I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor moving wherever moves a man; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things. Where he is, there is nature.

...

We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, and sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go."

-- Emerson

'To die, to sleep ... To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay there's the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause...' - Hamlet

- Status quo bias

- A report by the president's council on bioethics: Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness

Excerpt:

"... Yet if there is merit in the suggestion that too long a life, with its end out of sight and mind, might diminish its worth, one might wonder whether we have already gone too far in increasing longevity. If so, one might further suggest that we should, if we could, roll back at least some of the increases made in the average human lifespan over the past century.

These remarks prompt some large questions: Is there an optimal human lifespan and an ideal contour of a human life? If so, does it resemble our historical lifespan (as framed and constrained by natural limits)?* Or does the optimal human lifespan lie in the future, to be achieved by some yet-to-be-developed life-extending technology? Whatever the answers to these intriguing and important questions, nothing in our inquiry ought to suggest that the present average lifespan is itself ideal...”

- A book reco: Flowers for Algernon

- And lastly a rant. Notice how a lot of SF stories and movies tend to be alarmist? There is a new invention which makes humans superhuman, or AI is developed to aid humans, or a new drug is discovered, or a paleontological species is recreated, or humans overcome odds to grow brains to travel across space. In the end, there is always a catch, and things go horribly wrong and threaten extinction, some calamitous catastrophe or at least a few shrieking kids later, a hitherto incompetent but large-hearted doofus saves everyone, or a flaw in the thingamacascafadr-that-is-hitherto-not-discovered-by-super-intelligences-but-the-reader/audience-can-get-in-one-cinematic-revelation brings the adversary to its suspiciously anthropomorphic knees. Sick.

Two quotes that I came across recently I liked:

"Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself" -- A. H. Weiler

"A good horse runs when it sees even the shadow of a whip" -- The Buddha

Deep wisdom, good advice, metacognition

Have you had a conversation with someone on a subject you did not quite know much about, or read a write-up on a subject on which you have limited expertise, and subsequently remarked "Now, that is deep". Better even, have you asked someone for advice regarding something you did not know how to handle, and subsequently remarked "That is good advice". I have, and recoiled at the metacognitive gaffe. (Subsequently, the occurrences of my these utterances have diminished.)

(In order to know that the wisdom is deep, your own wisdom of the subject matter must be deep. In order to know that the advice is good, you must have a way to judge good and bad solutions.)

I think perhaps, this is explainable as a matter of terminology:

- When one says "This is deep", one doesn't really mean that one can gauge the depth of the wisdom. One just means that the wisdom is/was sufficiently nontrivial, that one's mind could imagine that the path to it must be hard.

- When one says "This is good advice", one perhaps doesn't really mean that one metacognitively examined the quality of the advice against other solutions and realized it's superiority, but instead means

• the solution given meets some desirability criteria (known a priori) that would be common to unknown solutions to the problem at hand.

or

• the solution to the problem makes one feel emotionally good.

Or is this another thing to be expected of the status seeking missiles that are humans? i.e. upon encountering depth, or quality, humans want to signal themselves and others that they possess the metacognitive ability to evaluate it? Or is this just an ack, to make the other person feel better?