07.14.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:09 am by fred
From Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain
your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.
systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of “self-organised criticality“. These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour - such as a swinging pendulum - and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.
experiments have confirmed that these models accurately describe what real brain tissue does. They build on the observation that when a single neuron fires, it can trigger its neighbours to fire too, causing a cascade or avalanche of activity that can propagate across small networks of brain cells. This results in alternating periods of quiescence and activity - remarkably like the build-up and collapse of a sand pile.
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05.21.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:29 am by fred
From Heidegger and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
[According to Princeton economist Alan Blinder] the labor market of the next decades won’t necessarily be divided between the highly educated and the less-educated: “The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via wireless connections) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not.” Binder goes on to summarize his own take: “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Learning a trade is not limiting but, rather, liberating. If you are in possession of a skill that cannot be exported overseas, done with an algorithm, or downloaded, you will always stand a decent chance of finding work. Even rarer, you will probably be a master of your own domain, something the thousands of employed but bored people in the service industries can only dream of.
Working over the internet is freeing because you can do it from anywhere, but the flip-side is that you are then in competition with the entire world
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05.04.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:39 pm by fred
From an essay by Milton Glaser:
“… there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.”
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03.20.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:17 am by fred
From The Unfinished in The New Yorker:
The central issue for Wallace remained, as he told McCaffery, how to give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” He added, “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”
The novel continues Wallace’s preoccupation with mindfulness. It is about being in the moment and paying attention to the things that matter, and centers on a group of several dozen I.R.S. agents working in the Midwest. Their job is tedious, but dullness, “The Pale King” suggests, ultimately sets them free. A typed note that Wallace left in his papers laid out the novel’s idea: “Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”
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02.23.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:45 pm by fred
From Foreclosures Are Not the Problem. Those Who Build Financial Time Bombs, and Those Who Pick Them Up, Are the Problem on Angry Bear [emphasis added]:
But the real problem, the cause of this whole mess, is simple: every few decades, our economic system morphs into a structure that rewards making things less than it rewards creating financial time bombs with multi-year fuses. We’ve been rewarding the financial time bomb makers more and more since Reagan took office. And this is also the second time since Reagan took office we’ve been bailing out the financial time bomb makers at great cost to the rest of us - the previous time was during the S&L crisis.
Things have now evolved to the point where for some reason, when the market for time bombs disappears its considered some sort of a tragedy. This time around, we’ve already helped out the grifters, including many investment banks, commercial banks, derivatives traders, and now we’ve moved on to helping the marks. And rewarding any of them, the grifters or the marks, is a problem for several reasons. It rewards the bad behavior of the financial time bomb makers and reduces the incentives the rest of us have to watch out for the crooks. (And yes, I know, people living next to foreclosed homes suffer too. But externalities come in both positive and negative varieties, and folks who benefited from home prices rising for no reason don’t have a complaint when the home prices drop back in value because people found out the rise happened shouldn’t have happened in the first place.) It also keeps an unviable system going, and it does so at great cost.
But there’s one more thing. Since this whole thought process, this current iteration of the art of rewarding of the financial time bomb makers, dates back to Reagan, it pays to go back to Reagan… And when Reagan conjured up images of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen, it pissed people off not because there were people who needed help, but because supposedly many people who were getting help were, according Reagan, living better than the people being taxed to help them. And while I for one have never had a problem with seeing some of my tax money go toward helping the unfortunate, and I’ve never had a problem with welfare, at this moment in time, I know with absolute certainty that more most of the new-fangled welfare from the last six months is directed to helping people who are better off than I or have lived much better than I in recent years (investment banks, commercial banks, derivatives traders, and now homeowners) than the poor. I resent it. Does Obama really want a country where the folks who make and pick up time bombs are rewarded at the expense of those who are too honest to make time bombs or were smart enough (and in some cases, lucky enough) not to pick them up?
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02.12.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:04 pm by fred
Here is an excerpt from “Looking for a Garde of Which to be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace” as it appeared in the Spring 1993 issue of Whiskey Island magazine published by Cleveland State University.
But there are a few books I have read that I’ve never been the same after, and I think all good writing somehow addresses the concern of and acts as an anodyne against loneliness. We’re all terribly, terribly lonely. And there’s a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can’t be in the real world. I don’t know what you’re thinking. I don’t know that much about you as I don’t know that much about my parents or my lover or my sister, but a piece of fiction that’s really true allows you to be intimate with …. I don’t want to say people, but it allows you to be intimate with a world that resembles our own in enough emotional particulars so that the way different things must feel is carried out with us into the real world. I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely. Or really to affect people.
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02.02.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:12 am by fred
The emotional states inside us are very, very real and the product of biological evolution. They are helpful to us in our attempt to survive. Experimental economics and behavioral sciences have recently shown us how important they are to us as social creatures: To cooperate you have to trust the other party, even though a rational analysis will tell you that both the likelihood and the cost of being cheated is very high. When you trust, you experience a physiologically detectable inner glow of pleasure. So the inner emotional state says yes. However, if you rationally consider the objects in the outside world, the other parties, and consider their trade-offs and motives, you ought to choose not to cooperate. Analyzing the outside world makes you say no. Human cooperation is dependent on our giving weight to what we experience as the inner world compared to what we experience as the outer world.
INSIDE OUT: THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF EVERYTHING, by TOR NØRRETRANDERS
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09.12.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:37 pm by fred
Many people use the phrase least common denominator to describe something as being base or common. It connotes something that appeals to most people, something that we all value. It is the intersection of what we all value, in the set-theory sense. But in arithmetic the LCD is the union of the prime factors of the denominators (including the multiplicity of those factors).
Perhaps greatest common divisor is a better metaphor for what is typically described as an LCD, the GCD being the intersection of prime factors.
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07.10.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:24 pm by fred
“It ought to be plain
how little you gain
by getting excited
and vexed.
You’ll always be late
for the previous train,
and always in time
for the next.”
-Piet Hein
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06.02.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:05 pm by fred
A Times Online interview with Nicholas Taleb includes this one-paragraph bit of investment advice:
[T]he good investment strategy is to put 90% of your money in the safest possible government securities and the remaining 10% in a large number of high-risk ventures. This insulates you from bad black swans and exposes you to the possibility of good ones. Your smallest investment could go “convex” – explode – and make you rich. High-tech companies are the best. The downside risk is low if you get in at the start and the upside very high. Banks are the worst – all the risk is downside. Don’t be tempted to play the stock market – “If people knew the risks they’d never invest.”
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