Nothing much to be said, really.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Afternoon Diversion - SISTAR
Time spent doing Zhan Zhuang passes by very quickly while I watch this :P
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Amor Fati
A good spirit or Tykhon (the personification of good fortune). The good spirit holds spits in his hands as a sign of good luck, and is shown with enlarged genitals.
Today was a nice day. There were no bad news, no life-threatening events. Everything was boring and ordinary and quiet and comfortable. But at any moment it could have been worse. Mistakes could have been made, or a confluence could have occurred where things overlapped and changed everything for me.
I think that as we grow older this becomes more and more apparent - that we don't have absolute control over the universe. Our death or our ruination may come in the next breath, and we would never know. What things are even now happening behind the scenes, to someday threaten our lives and hopes and dreams? For the sake of our sanity we retreat ourselves into self-contained, "safe" little universes. Thinking that if we do not mind what's out there, that it can't hurt us; we strike this bargain, conveniently forgetting that those outside forces didn't actually agree to this deal. We will never be immune to absurd coincidence ruling our lives.
Greater men have been laid low by circumstance. And not everyone who adapts does so quickly enough, or appropriately enough. Robert Greene talked about "Amor Fati" - loving your fate, whatever it might be. This is the same concept the Stoics espoused, with regard to not letting your mind be clouded. Victor Frankl also wrote about acceptance in his book - that one can find meaning in one's life even through accepting the unacceptable. I take his word for it, him being a man who has thoroughly lived this philosophy.
According to Robert Greene, accepting whatever comes your way leads to nothing being able to truly hurt you - for, as he puts it, you are able to "turn shit into sugar." Like this person.
I still dread the future, but I will endeavor to accept. I will be grateful for today; and I will be aware that things could have been worse, and yet they weren't. And if I find myself in a hole, I promise I will stop digging immediately and work hard to get out of it. Amen.
Your mistakes, like mine, are a part of who you are now. You can't move on from that. Believe me, I've made a sizable number. But...sometimes your mistakes can surprise you. My biggest mistake, for instance, brought me here. At exactly this moment when you might need some help.
Monday, April 22, 2013
Tragedies
I posted this stub before about a ZenPencils poster I found. I'm calling attention to this because even up to now I still feel the same, perhaps even more so after reading this article on a victim of the Boston bombings.
She had wanted to be a bank analyst. She went to a different country in order to pursue her goals. These things already mark her as special - I should know, being someone who has struggled against failure and self-sabotage. What she was able to accomplish was impressive - who knows what she would have been able to do had she lived longer?
We are all going to die, and we are lucky because there are those who never will. They, who were never born, include people with talent greater than ours. And yet it is us in our ordinariness who are here. I believe this. But what of those who were born, but who die too early? They include this young woman whom I had the honor of reading about. She was more than me, perhaps more than I could ever be. And yet it is me in my ordinariness who is here, not her.
I feel something heavy on my shoulders at the thought.
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Hands Free Penta Kill
Kudos, sir. This is Grand Achievement, indisputably.
Gamer Gets a Rare League of Legends Kill Without Using Hands
Friday, April 19, 2013
Blast from the Past - Sleeping Fist!
I was going around reddit when I found mention of this gem. They used to have this movie on reruns when I was a kid, must have watched it a half-dozen times. The dub is ridiculously funny, but it's the same dub I remember years ago - swearing included, haha.
Notice that the guy on the left outright stops the kick, while the one on the right diverts the punch. Old man has some seriously efficient kung fu.
Jin
This discussion in rumsoakedfist is very informative. It seems like there are many ways of generating power in the Chinese martial arts. Erle Montaigue enumerated a couple others in his Power Taiji series (copies found here). I think there's something in this, that could probably be used. It's certainly food for thought for me.
Having fun with WebMatrix
I only recently learned about this IDE yesterday. It's got a ton of functionality and looks really convenient to use. Best of all, it's free - I'll be playing around with this some more on my off time. Here's something I made:
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| It's T-ARA's Eun-jung's Twitter feed! At least, I hope it's Ham Eun-jung's |
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
I suppose we don't need more convincing of how horrible we can be to one another. I can only imagine a little of what the victims are probably going through - children can be cruel, and who ever really grows up nowadays?
But I wish there was someone who told them: these people who are tormenting you don't know you. They're not people of substance, and should not be listened to. They're average people, trying to fill up their dull lives with flashy imagery and shallow posturing. They don't care whether you live or die because you were never real to them to begin with - well, not much is real to them anyway. In a hundred years they won't even be remembered, save perhaps for a census entry.
The world changes explosively almost every decade. The Internet won't stay the same; think about Friendster. Remember Friendster? For a time it was like Facebook - now all the images and video and comments are gone. Whatever they put up, isn't going to last. It's the tendency of these people to settle for building things that don't last.
But you - while you're still in the world, you have a chance. You can build something that might exist until the next age of Man. Tomorrow brings new wonders, new possibilities. There will always be others who will love you for who you are. There will always be paths you can travel. There are entire worlds out there who wouldn't have even heard of your humiliation. So much left to discover, baby - but only if you stay here, with us.
It's unfair, what you have to go through. People make the world unfair. But when you're gone, there's nothing. No more bad feelings, and no more good times either. The good times are worth it. Do you understand? This is the life. This is the only life!
On dealing with aggression
In the end, I don't have to live with this fellow, so I don't really
care if he is an idiot. And we can't all go about our lives trying to
correct the behaviour of idiots.
In this regard, I always say that it is pointless trying to swat mosquitoes at a barbecue. You'll never get them all. You're far better off applying insect repellant or moving indoors. Idiots are the same: too numerous to deal with on a case-by-case basis.
So I agree with my friend Jeff Mann when he says:
In this regard, I always say that it is pointless trying to swat mosquitoes at a barbecue. You'll never get them all. You're far better off applying insect repellant or moving indoors. Idiots are the same: too numerous to deal with on a case-by-case basis.
So I agree with my friend Jeff Mann when he says:
- "I
completely understand and share your sentiments. While some of the
resistance we may offer (verbal or otherwise) is designed to make us
feel better, there is an element of spite in there as well."
Pearls of wisdom from Mr. Dan Djurdjevic. I find myself reading his series of articles on non-aggression a lot lately. I'm a hothead and even though my implementation of his ideas is not perfect, he's helped me make things not as worse as they could be. Hopefully this can help someone out there - link
Irrationality, Week 4
I thought the image above appropriate, since Sancus was an avenger of dishonesty; Week 3 of Dan Ariely's course on Irrationality covered dishonesty. It's interesting stuff - his idea is that within a group there aren't a few bad apples, everybody cheats regardless of the reward or the likelihood of being caught - but they all cheat only a little bit, because they still want to appear moral to themselves. Impartial or biased behavior also arises every time there is a conflict of interest.
The readings for this section were fairly long - I was only able to get take down summaries for five out of the six articles, which is a shame because the last one was all about the psychology and evolution of self-deception. I'll try to finish reading it sometime.
Here are my notes about the other papers:
Contagion and Differentiation in Unethical Behavior: The Effect of One Bad Apple on the Barrel - Dishonest behavior is affected by social norms and saliency more than cost-benefit analysis. Subjects in the two experiments demonstrated that when the unethical behavior is done by someone identified as not part of their group, dishonesty is reduced; the reverse happens when the unethical behavior is done by someone identified as belonging to their group. With salience, even just calling attention to the likelihood of unethical behavior caused dishonesty to be reduced. The control was a situation where cheating would be detected unfailingly; however, the findings indicate possible applications in policies to curb dishonest behavior. Dishonest behavior is contagious.
Prefrontal white matter in pathological liars -Liars and malingerers have more white matter and less white-to-grey ratio in their prefrontal cortex, even after controlling for brain volume, age, psychopathy, and antisocial personality disorder
Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing -Being put in a state where one's self-concept of one's morality is threatened results in a need to cleanse one's physical body and/or a greater affinity for cleaning products. Physically cleansing oneself also alleviates negative impressions caused by being in a state of threatened morality. The mechanism for this seems to be that a person will engage in activities to make indicators of a particular self-concept meet standards if that person perceives that his identification with that self-concept is lacking, even if said activities may not be related. In the case of morality, the tie to ideas of cleanliness and purity was probably where this tendency came from.The Dishonesty of Honest People: A Theory of Self-Concept Maintenance -Based on the results of this paper, even though people place a high value on honesty and in general ascribe to moral standards, they justify dishonest actions through malleability of categories (for example, stealing a pen against stealing money equivalent to the price of a pen). Even though they may be aware that their actions are dodgy, they may let awareness of such actions "fly under the radar" and refuse to update their self-concept with regard to this behavior. Instead of magnitude of punishment or likelihood of getting caught, it seems like being reminded of their moral standards and having them compare their possible actions to this at the point before temptation strikes is more effective in reducing dishonesty.Justified Ethicality: Observing Desired Counterfactuals Modifies Ethical Perceptions and Behavior -People lie more often when they perceive a justification for their behavior, even if such justification is known only to them. This is because people value feeling honest in their eyes. One justification used in the study was that an event "falling just short" of reality could be passed off as reality (a lie). People are less likely to lie in a situation where there is a narrow choice of options, because it becomes harder to justify to themselves the act of lying.
Week 4 is all about labor and motivation, can't wait!
Friday, April 12, 2013
Blast from the Past - Dream High!
This was a great find - I loved the original series, and this was a nice way to end things for the fans. And Ham Eun-jung looked amazing!
Link Dump!
These are some articles I'm reading right now. There's some cool information here, I hope you find something that takes your fancy!
philosophy
improvement
language
go
air quality
programming
scala
misc
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Money
I just finished Week 2 of Dan Ariely's free course "A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior." This week was all about money. It was all about how we aren't really strategic when using a resource that we work so hard for. And even when we have all the money we need, we're still not happy.
The above clip from "Glengarry Glen Ross" gives an inkling about how cutthroat working can be. The stakes are really high, and people can be inspired to take advantage no matter how unethical the situation becomes. The salesmen have it rough especially since we generally don't want to part with our money; it's this tendency called pain of paying. Things would be easier if the payments were using credit cards though, as the more a mode of payment becomes removed from actual physical currency the more willing people are to part with their funds.
In the movie, a character protests that their leads are weak, which I took to mean that their prospective marks weren't big-shots. To invest in real estate when the costs of doing so are so huge compared to one's income and savings means you have to be suffering some pretty strong delusions to go through with it.
The sales tricks of offering something for free and offering bulk purchases serve to screw with our decisions - when something is free we don't focus as much on the quality and usefulness of the product, or even if we want such a thing at all. We'd pick the free option over what we truly want, if the latter has a price attached to it. Offering bulk purchases makes it so that the costs of what we're purchasing jump less at awareness. And if that isn't enough, we tend to forget that we have a pool of money to draw from. We instead operate under a tacit understanding that this much money needs to be consumed only for this category of goods. In essence, it's hard to provide an accurate accounting for what we are giving up when we choose to buy something, so we don't - we just focus on the cost on the price tag.
And when we have money, we get primed to be less helpful and less likely to seek out others. The irony is that from studies the behavioral economists do, it's clear that we derive more pleasure from using our money and other resources to help others. The social considerations trump the financial ones in a happy life.
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