Mortality

I can die any time, any day.

Routine dump

[By 'routine' I mean whenever my Nokia 1208 runs out of draft space, and I have to start sending messages to 42 so that they get stored in the Sent Items folder]


First draft - do I have a gravitational field better than most?


Tulna tab tak sahi hai jab tak weh eershya me nahi badal jaati.

[तुलना तब तक सही है जब तक वेह ईर्ष्या में नहीं बदल जाती]

Check Somebody To Love on pod.


Another conversation starter: So I guess we're lucky to have lived so far.


Deal with solitude - or, for self-pitying fools who don't realize how essential and fortunate they are to have some solitude, loneliness - take a walk, buy good groceries, come back home, cook, read, eat, work out, sleep.


Time is like intestinal gas - it must pass.


Mr Malviya taught me - us - percussion. He was a good teacher, and a good human being. I have no doubts about my judgment on this - his - matter.


I want a short fun life, and a quick death.


Katoch Jr had said that cold water doesn't really extinguish one's thirst. In the vernacular - not that that makes a difference; I trust my transliteration. What is relevant is that Grover just said the opposite. Haha.


I don't care anymore. [Update: I hardly care anymore.]


Tarsier


Flight overhead - east to west - 2240 hours, 16 July 2012.


Good work by Zain Mustafa, and a shout out to The Only since she makes me miss reading London in lists of places.

Prime example of the Beatles making whimsical songs: Lovely Rita


I take my peers seriously, and hope they see my jest for jest and my earnestness for earnestness.


It has been great socializing - or not - and now I look forward to collecting my thoughts and directing my actions.


I have, if temporarily, lost the thrill I obtained from social media. It's allure has faded.


K., you are empty. You inhale and exhale gases, and it doesn't matter which end of you they come out from, nor the sounds they make as they exit.


Life, crawling around in the dark, still finds purpose and money, is that a Freudian slip, meaning, I meant, it makes sense, as when sport is played - beautifully - or movement of water, disturbed - randomly? Live. The verb, not the adjective.


Through Your Eyes, by Cognac. A great song by a great band with a great name. Overkill? Haha.

42

6-hourism

My DCE Years, encapsulated

This one sentence from http://www.knewton.com/adaptive-learning-white-paper/why-knewton ; encapsulates my five years at Delhi College of Engineering (thankfully now non-existent, HAHA):

"Nothing is more dissatisfying to students than feeling like the challenges they face are essentially arbitrary and culminate in nothing."

This reminds me, my message memory is full. 42! 6-hourism!

The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

16
Categorizing always produces reduction in true complexity.

27
...a profession that is "scalable", that is, one in which
you are not paid by the hour...

28
A scalable profession is good only if you are successful;
they are more competitive, produce monstrous inequalities,
and are far more random...

30
...-death is often a good career move for an author.

46
...Pyrrhonian skeptics...

58
...Popper...uncertainty is our discipline, and that
understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete
information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

64
Talk is cheap, a problem with advice-giving philosophy we
will see...

67
Our minds are like inmates, captive to our biology, unless
we manage a cunning escape.

68
...perception of causation has a biological foundation.

69
We, members of the human variety of primates, have a hunger
for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of
matters so they can get into our heads.

87
If you run a public corporation, things were great for you
before you had shareholders, when you and your partners
were the sole owners...

91
Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump
of great news.

101
...a problem with the way we construct samples and gather
evidence IN EVERY DOMAIN. [Italics in the book are in ALL
CAPS here.] ...the difference between what you see and what
is there.

135
We tend to "tunnel" while looking into the future...in fact
there is nothing usual about the future.

140
Epistemic arrogance bears a double effect: we overestimate
what we know, and underestimate uncertainty, by compressing
the rang of possible uncertain states (i.e. by reducing the
space of the unknown).

158
But things changed with the intrusion of the spreadsheet.

172
...the information that the solution exists is itself a big
piece of the solution.

174
There is so little room in our consciousness; it is winner
-take-all up there.

179
...analysis in situ...

181
..."fallacy of misplaced concreteness", e.g., the mistake
of confusing a model with the physical entity that it means
to describe.

189
In a way, projecting allows us to cheat evolution: it now
takes place in our head, as a series of projections and
counterfactual scenarios.

191
HOMO SUM, HUMANI A ME NIL ALIENUM PUTO - I am a man, and
nothing human is foreign to me.

193
Some truths only hit children - adults and nonphilosophers
get sucked into the minutiae of practical life and need to
worry about "serious matters"...seemingly more relevant
questions.

194
We laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will
be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too
remote day.

201
...statement by the uberphilosopher Bertand Russell...

204
Trial and error means trying a lot. In THE BLIND
WATCHMAKER, Richard Dawkins...

218
The theory of preferential attachment is ubiquitous in its
applications...

220
We humans are not photocopiers...To be contagious, a mental
category must agree with our nature.

223
 - as long as there is life, there is hope.

227
...the emphasis on economic inequality, at the expense of
other types of inequality...Fairness is not exclusively an
economic matter...It is the pecking order that matters!

240
G.H.Hardy wrote in "a Mathematician's Apology": ..."real";
"useless"; "applied"; "pure"

244
...gentlemen scientists...Wittgenstein...

256
One can almost always ferret out predecessors for any
thought.

258
...the Mandelbrot set...

260
[Header; perhaps a play on S Pastis' excellent Pearls
Before Swine] Pearls to Swine

269
...the intuition of the following error: traveling the road
between representation and reality in the wrong direction.

272
I sat down and discussed this with the great man, and it
became, as usual, a linguistic game. [Deja vu for me,
exacerbated by the presence of not one but many great men
who are all almost always too willing to discuss anything -
ANYTHING - to its death, and beyond.]

277
...it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in
social science, not its validity.

281
The entire statistical business confused absence of proof
as proof of absence.

283
...Locke's definition of a madman: someone "reasoning
correctly from erroneous premises".

287
If there is one thing on this planet that is not so
uncertain, it is the behavior of a collection of subatomic
particles!

289
...the philosopher's case is far, far more dangerous since
he uses up our storage for critical thinking in a sterile
occupation. Philosophers like to practice philosophical
thinking on me-too subjects that other philosophers call
philosophy, and they leave their minds at the door when
they are outside of these subjects.


Wittgenstein is occasionally mentioned (you can always
mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always
seem relevant).

291
...philosophers who "study" philosophy instead of being
forced into philosophy by the pressure of nonphilosophical
problems.

296
I worry less about embarassment than about missing an
opportunity.

297
Snub your destiny.


You stand ABOVE the rat race and the pecking order, not
OUTSIDE of it, if you do so by choice.


It is more difficult to be a loser in a game you set up
yourself.


You always control what YOU do; so make this your end.