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
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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?

Intention, Free Will etc.

'When the real demonstration came he had us walk on stage, and he hypnotized us in front of the whole Princeton Graduate College. This time the effect was stronger; I guess I had learned how to become hypnotized. The hypnotist made various demonstrations, having me do things that I couldn't normally do, and at the end he said that after I came out of hypnosis,instead of returning to my seat directly, which was the natural way to go, I would walk all the way around the room and go to my seat from the back. All through the demonstration I was vaguely aware of what was going on, and cooperating with the things the hypnotist said, but this time I decided, "Damn it, enough is enough! I'm gonna go straight to my seat." When it was time to get up and go off the stage, I started to walk straight to my seat. But then an annoying feeling came over me: I felt so uncomfortable that I couldn't continue. I walked all the way around the hall.'
...
'So I found hypnosis to be a very interesting experience. All the time you're saying to yourself, "I could do that, but I won't" -- which is just another way of saying that you can't.'

------- Richard Feynman, "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman"

'I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.'
--------- Sherlock Holmes, "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone" by A.C. Doyle.

Enter the I of the vortex

Quick Gun Meran

The update on the WCC match between Kramnik and Anand is that Anand selected what appears to be a brilliant strategy of turning the tables on Kramnik. To counter Kramnik's longstanding "Safety with Black, push with White" strategy, Anand seems to have adopted the "Safety with White, attack with Black" strategy. And so far it has worked brilliantly.

Anand leads the match 3.5 - 1.5 having won 2/3 Black games. With 7 games to come, Kramnik faces a precipitous uphill climb. Kramnik needs to play in an unprecedented manner to have a shot at the title from here on.

Interestingly, Anand has shown that he can ditch his loyal preference for 1. e4, which he has consistently stuck to over a very long, eventful and brilliantly successful career, by choosing to move 1. d4 against a player who is one of the current experts on both sides of the d-pawn opening. Moreover, Anand has energetically entered the Meran lines of the QGD semi-slav while responding to 1. d4, which makes for sharp chess which suits Anand style, in positions he has had a lot of success in the past.

Kramnik has to do something extra-ordinary to stage a comeback, and while this is not unheard of in WCC matches, it promises great chess for the next few days.

An excellent paper on the economics of moral righteousness: Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values and taboo cognitions

A classical duel: The aging lightning kid takes on the ice king

The paths of two shooting stars in the chess world will cross in a few days, in an event that will be noted with at best mildly passing curiosity (I am basing this on history for guide) by all but a few geeky woodpushers across the world. This championship match is of historical importance, for it marks the end of an era of controversy in the chess world. Probably the most popularly held view is that the rarefied area at the top of the world of chess is split in the middle, with Vishy Anand wearing the crown handed down from Wilhelm Steinitz from champion to champion, when the previous champion of the bloodline lay it on the line in a tournament style championship held under the auspices of FIDE. FIDE held the championship tournament in 2007 to unify the bloodline title with the FIDE world championship title. Traditionally leaning chess fans feel strongly about the handing over of the bloodline title over a tournament, which they feel doesn't establish the head-to-head superiority of the champion over the challengers. Vladimir Kramnik will be playing Vishy Anand for the unified world championship title in a head-to-head 12 game match.

Vishy Anand: Known for his extremely quick calculations, however in classical games, speed of calculation is usually not of prime importance. Anand's style is sharp but safe and probing. His creative approach does open up vulnerabilities in his camp OTB, but at the same time prods the opponent into areas of tactical possibilities where Anand out calculates his rival. He is known to play the so called "open game" in almost every game of his career with White, by choosing to move 1.e4. This will be a potential weakness for him, since Kramnik is expected to play neutralising lines from the Petroff defence 1...e5, 2.Nf3, Nf6 and so on, which have proven very hard to crack so far. However, Anand does have a more incisive track record with Black than Kramnik, but Kramnik is known to be close to undefeatable with White. Anand's nerves could be a problem for him, especially if he lets Kramnik take the lead early.

Vladimir Kramnik: Known for his deep positional play. Kramnik is known to play for positional long term advantages, especially with White. He is known to seek positions that offer slow gradual improvement, which Kramnik usually exploits to grind down the opponent until he/she pops. Kramnik has been criticized by fans for his extreme passive play with Black, where he firmly places the burden-to-prove-advantage on the player playing White. With Black, he is known to avoid all complicating and risky lines, and is content with entering drawing lines at the earliest opportunity, unless the opponent blunders. This strategy has proven very efficacious for him in all three WC matches he has been part of. His solid playing style and ability to come back from losing the lead make him a formidable match opponent, although his style is not well adapted in winning tournaments where one has to win a lot of games.

The two opponents go back a long way, with Kramnik holding a tiny lead over Anand in head-to-head classical games. I think that this will be a very interesting match, with Kramnik somewhat of a pre-match favourite. I would put it at 55%-45% in favour of Kramnik.

We are all individuals!

(I attempt at haiku)

I pause from pithy
prose and my dry doggerel
to write bad haiku
--------

Ages pass it seems
until the one asks you how
you have felt lately
---------

A jaundiced moon beamed
down on old 101
and she rode with me
----------

I watched her recede
and walk away out of sight
the sun was way harsh
-----------

Mid happy chatter
I rise for a quick breath
of isolation
-----------

Thought that burns right through
the fabric of a subject
like a cigarette

Have hit a dry spell w.r.t. evocative thought. Might take a break from the parables, hyperbole... ellipses too, and stick to some laconic sections for a while.