The Operating System

Fraction of Bachelor’s Degrees Earned by Women, by Majorvia APS...

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:56:00 -0400

Fraction of Bachelor’s Degrees Earned by Women, by Major
via APS Physics

.2
Relevant to my interests.

"You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 22:51:00 -0400

““You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff. A related phenomenon is the ongoing transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb ‘to like’ from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse: from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitution for loving.””

- Jonathan Franzen (via the-lone-pamphleteer)

••••••

But Jonathan Franzen is looking at love/like/etc. in very socio-culturally accepted ways. Accepted does not mean true, nor does it mean untrue. It means we have an “image” of what “love” should be — an idealization. The image we have of Love is placed on such a high pedestal, that we don’t dare think of it in any other way. And that unwillingness to think differently is wrong. (Except, I’m being silly, because I think unwillingness to dissent is also a phenomenon with roots in biology and evolutionary fitness. Group-think is totally necessary for survival, thus desired.)

Our image of Love is based solely on cultural tradition, trusted because of Time. Trusting that something is true solely on the basis that it’s been accepted for longer than we can fathom, is a fallacy.

Let’s think of it another way: what we know to be Love is just an expression of biological bonding / cooperation that was selected for since it worked well to proliferate the species. Bonding and cooperation — we’re probably more OK with commodification of those things because they’re already on less of a pedestal than Love. They already seem more mundane. Our alarms aren’t going off. And doesn’t it make sense that cooperation between kith (and kin) is based on commodities? Based on assets? It was always about that.

Go play the iPhone game, Osmos. The objective is “Become Bigger”. That’s what life does, at very basic levels. And to do that, it requires assets in the forms of food and children, and it needs resources to obtain food to have children, to become bigger, to multiply.

Sure, that seems reductionist and maybe even “ugly”, but is it really? From that perspective — if you allow yourself to entertain the thought, not even believe it, but just entertain it — doesn’t it make sense that “love” would be “commodified”? It’s just showing up in a different way than we’ve seen before. It’s not some “evil” of the modern, technological age. It’s just an evolution of what always was.

I’m not saying any of the above is factual/certain — just something to consider and break out of the band-wagon a bit. Because my genes are all wrong and I’m probably not gonna multiply.

MIT edX: Classical Mechanics with Walter Lewin 8.01x is an...

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:31:30 -0400

MIT edX: Classical Mechanics with Walter Lewin

8.01x is an online version of Classical Mechanics, which is the first of MIT’s introductory physics courses. In addition to the basic concepts of Newtonian mechanics, fluid mechanics, and kinetic gas theory, a variety of other interesting topics are covered, such as resonance phenomena, musical instruments, astronomical phenomena such as binary stars, neutron stars, black holes, stellar collapse, and supernovae. You will also be given a peek into the intriguing world of quantum mechanics.

Starts Sept. 9, 2013.

Register —›

Reductionism vs Emergent Laws

Tue, 21 May 2013 02:02:47 -0400

Reductionism vs Emergent Laws

Don’t confuse practicality with importance.

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:57:00 -0400

Don’t confuse practicality with importance.

"What shapes one’s attitude toward oneself is the fact that skill and equipment for performing a..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:02:45 -0400

“

What shapes one’s attitude toward oneself is the fact that skill and equipment for performing a given task are not sufficient; one must be able to “put one’s personality across” in competition with many others in order to have success. If it were enough for the purpose of making a living to rely on what one knows and what one can do, one’s self-esteem would be in proportion to one’s capacities, that is, to one’s use value. But since success depends largely on how one sells one’s personality, one experiences oneself as a commodity or, rather, simultaneously as the seller and the commodity to be sold. A person is not concerned with his or her life and happiness, but with becoming salable. […]

The “identity crisis” of modern society is actually the crisis produced by the fact that its members have become selfless instruments, whose identity rests upon their participation in the corporations (or other giant bureaucracies), as a primitive individual’s identity rested upon membership in the clan.

”

- Erich Fromm – to have or to be? (via frrrst)

frrrst: The Feynman Series – Beauty (Part 1)

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:01:26 -0400

frrrst:

The Feynman Series – Beauty (Part 1)

"Immature people falling in love destroy each other’s freedom, create a bondage, make a prison...."

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:10:08 -0400

“Immature people falling in love destroy each other’s freedom, create a bondage, make a prison. Mature persons in love help each other to be free; they help each other to destroy all sorts of bondages. And when love flows with freedom there is beauty. When love flows with dependence there is ugliness.

A mature person does not fall in love, he or she rises in love. Only immature people fall; they stumble and fall down in love. Somehow they were managing and standing. Now they cannot manage and they cannot stand. They were always ready to fall on the ground and to creep. They don’t have the backbone, the spine; they don’t have the integrity to stand alone.

A mature person has the integrity to stand alone. And when a mature person gives love, he or she gives without any strings attached to it. When two mature persons are in love, one of the great paradoxes of life happens, one of the most beautiful phenomena: they are together and yet tremendously alone. They are together so much that they are almost one. Two mature persons in love help each other to become more free. There is no politics involved, no diplomacy, no effort to dominate. Only freedom and love.”

- Osho (via electrichoney)

Biologists, Neuroscientists,

Sun, 19 May 2013 17:45:58 -0400

Hypothetically, what would you say to someone asking the “chicken or egg” question about neural chemistry: Does neurologocal/chemical/genetic information precede personality/responses/disposition or is it simply an expression of metaphysical “events”?

For example, those who believe in soul or karma and reincarnation, usually are more partial to the latter answer. For them, “chemistry” cannot possibly add up to the complex phenomenon they witness, therefore they accept the metaphysical answers more readily.

For a scientist, there may be other reasons to question “what came first,” but a metaphysical preference isn’t one of them. I wonder how valid the question is right now, for the scientific community.

It seems to me that we don’t yet know exactly how things add up to what we witness, and yet Evolutionary theory gives tells us that things were not even as organized as this, before. So the idea that there are some metaphysical absolutes that govern behavior seems a little silly, seeing how much behavior has changed over centuries and how much it differs between species (so long as we don’t take the anthropocentric stance, and do value the “morality”/experience/behavioral patterns of other species instead of casting that information aside and believing the “humans are special and endowed” paradigm.)

But back to it — how would you answer?

"Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 02:53:10 -0400

“Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”

- Nikki Giovanni (via amandaonwriting)

Funny. It can be the same for art. I’ve had people tell me that I definitely made something because of something that was happening in my life at the time, despite the fact that they had barely any idea of who I was then, not to mention no knowledge about my actual life’s events. Isn’t that silly? But how could you make something so personal if it didn’t happen to you? Empathy. Yes, that’s a good word for it.

Braintrust, by Patricia S. Churchland

Sun, 19 May 2013 02:40:41 -0400

Braintrust, by Patricia S. Churchland:

I’m concerned about this one. Kindle actually has a maximum of highlights one can make per book (I only found out while reading Infinite Jest, after highlighting pages at a time; probably to prevent copying) and I think I might reach it for this one. It’s really good.

"Trial by ordeal seemed to me, as I learned about it in school, ridiculously unfair. How could it..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 02:28:45 -0400

“

Trial by ordeal seemed to me, as I learned about it in school, ridiculously unfair. How could it have endured as an institution in Europe for hundreds of years?

The central idea was simple: with God’s intervention, innocence would plainly reveal itself, as the accused thief sank to the bottom of the pond, or the accused adulterer remained unburned by the red hot poker placed in his hand. Only the guilty would drown or burn. (For witches, the ordeal was less “forgiving”: if the accused witch drowned she was presumed innocent; if she bobbed to the surface, she was guilty, whereupon she was hauled off to a waiting fire.)

With time on our hands, my friend and I concocted a plan. She would falsely accuse me of stealing her purse, and then I would lay my hand on the stove and see whether it burned. We fully expected it would burn, and it did. So if the test was that obvious, how could people have trusted to trial by ordeal as a system of justice?

”

- Braintrust, by Patricia S. Churchland

Be Interested to Be Interesting

Sun, 19 May 2013 02:20:40 -0400

It’s funny when people say “you’re lucky you found something that you love doing.”

It reminds me of that thing Picasso supposedly said when some Parisian marveled at his 5-minute napkin drawing: “Sure it took 5 minutes… and forty years.” Quoted very loosely, but hopefully you get the idea. It’s a result of time and effort.

It’s also a strange thing to say (although I do understand what they mean) because it’s not like taking something from a grab-bag and deciding, “Oh yeah this one’s pretty good. I can do this.”

I used to think that way, as a child. I had no idea about the weight of things. There were fun things (like drawing) and horrible, boring things (like math). What depth was there? For a child, why not change your mind weekly: Teacher, Disney Animator, Doctor… What else? Same with subjects in school: all treated basically equally.

It’s only fairly recently that I started to see that maybe all’s not so equal at all. So when someone says “you’re lucky,” I wonder if they really don’t see it. It has nothing to do with luck. It’s just plain wonder. Taking a step back from living for a second, to wonder at it. Isn’t it WEIRD? Isn’t it interesting that you’re this bunch of non-sentient stuff that’s put together with some bits of code and rules and all of it comes together to make this “living” thing? Don’t you want to know more about that?

It’s unlike anything else, to wonder at that. You can say history is important or finances are important, but then it’s arbitrary human stuff. It could go this way or that, and have little effect on nature outside of our silly little planet. (Although we like to pretend otherwise, and superimpose biological feelings generally unique to our species onto the rest of the universe, with phrases like “Love conquers all.”) But there’s something you can learn about that does affect EVERYthing, regardless of planet or size or anything… Is that luck? It’s noticing. Finally noticing.

It’s important that humans have varied communities with members that have different skillsets in order to function, so we can’t possibly all have the same interests. But if you’re really wondering what to do with yourself, why revert to that grab-bag of subjects? Certainly sometimes circumstances dictate how you can proceed, but when you can make a choice, Why not Be Interested? There’s so much more outside of us…

When dealing in “big ideas” of any kind, the hardest thing is often to keep excited, genuinely...

Sun, 19 May 2013 01:34:11 -0400

When dealing in “big ideas” of any kind, the hardest thing is often to keep excited, genuinely enthusiastic, about what it is you loved in the first place.

Because inevitably there come unanswerable questions and insatiable critics, and hurdles of all kinds besides that. And suddenly you realize you’re spending too much time talking about what it is you want to be doing, and talking about all the things and idiocy that stand in the way of that, rather than actually doing anything.

It’s no good. The reality is you’ll always have to fight a little and do some convincing (especially if you want things like grants, or generally the ability to pursue your pursuits) but getting stuck in the fight, in the negativity, is no good.

"It did seem that likely Aristotle, Hume, and Darwin were right: we are social by nature. But what..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 01:15:00 -0400

“It did seem that likely Aristotle, Hume, and Darwin were right: we are social by nature. But what does that actually mean in terms of our brains and our genes? To make progress beyond the broad hunches about our nature, we need something solid to attach the claim to.”

- Braintrust, by Patricia S. Churchland

"The concept of the project I find useful. Something you do in the present, and can remember doing in..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:27:00 -0400

““The concept of the project I find useful. Something you do in the present, and can remember doing in the past, and expect to do in the future, in order to create something. A work of art which need not be in the arts per se, but something human worth doing.”
…
“That’s existentialism, yes?””

- 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson

"Gravity, mysterious gravity, immutably following its own laws, interacts with matter, and somehow..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:24:07 -0400

“Gravity, mysterious gravity, immutably following its own laws, interacts with matter, and somehow the result is complex motion. Invisible waves slinging rocks this way and that. What if human history has such invisible waves? Because ultimately the same forces apply. What big hits made us what we are? Will some new resonance create a wave and throw us in a new direction?”

- 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson

"‘You are not the same person you used to be, you have to admit. You’ve stuffed your brain with..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:21:00 -0400

“

‘You are not the same person you used to be, you have to admit. You’ve stuffed your brain with augmentations … When you grow the religious part of the temporal lobe, you can turn into a very different person, not to mention risking epilepsy. And that was only the start. Now you’ve got the animal stuff in there, you’ve got Pauline in there, recording everything you see—it is not insignificant. It can do damage. You end up being some kind of post-human thing. Or at least a different person.’

…

‘Every thing I’ve done to myself I consider part of being a human being. I mean, who wouldn’t do it if they could? I would be ashamed not to! It isn’t being post human, it’s being fully human. It would be stupid not to do the good things when you can, it would be antihuman.’

”

- 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson

"… she always found it odd to see canvas used as the medium, a bit like looking at scrimshaw or..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:18:59 -0400

“… she always found it odd to see canvas used as the medium, a bit like looking at scrimshaw or other antique exotica. When you had the world and your body as canvases, why deal in squares of wallpaper?”

- 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson

"… they were now their own unavoidable experiment, and were making themselves into many things..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:50:57 -0400

“… they were now their own unavoidable experiment, and were making themselves into many things they had never been before: augmented, multi-sexed, and most importantly, very long-lived, the oldest at that point being around two hundred years old. But not one whit wiser, or even more intelligent. Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since, dogs when we had been wolves.”

- 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson