niedziela, 30 lipca 2017
Venus in Aries
She desires to fall for someone that's his own man. She's attracted to Aries traits of courage to take risks and confidence. A cocksure male with a bit of swagger and hint of the fighter is for her. She finds it pleasurable to test her own mettle against another. She'll need a mate that's willing to give as good as he gets.
WHAT VENUS ARIES WOMEN ARE LOOKING FOR
The rush of new love. Sometimes she's easily bored after the initial excitement.The thrill of being at the edge. She's not looking for balance -- for her, being tilted forward into new experiences is where she's at home.A take charge mate. She's an initiator in love but will appreciate a lover with bold moves.Friction. Her creativity thrives in an atmosphere of provocation. She's not daunted by arguments, on the contrary, she comes alive in a vigorous debate.Competition. She's keen to win. Sometimes this is playful and endearing -- other times, it's relentless, aggressive or tiring.
GO-GETTER
Aries is a cardinal sign, meaning she goes after what she wants! It's the first dash out of the gate, and that's the energy she brings to love, with Venus here. As a lover, she's the spirit of Spring!
Keeping her interest means providing that level of charge. That means being quick on the draw, with fresh ideas and suggestions of things to do together. She enjoys dates that are physically active, over a passive night at the cinema.
She'll stay piqued by someone with their own irons in the fire. Perhaps it's best not to be too available, to promote your image as someone with a full life. This also gives her a chance to play the role of the huntress.
She'll lose interest if you unload your insecurities too soon. We all have them, but her way is to "act as if" and face fears like a charging ram. She's allured by those with a similar brave face, even when she senses the vulnerability underneath. She's more likely to admire those who act in the face of fear. And it's better to demonstrate this, than talk about it.
Her love style is sometimes at odds with the ideal of womanhood. That's why a Venus Aries woman really shines, with someone who "gets" that she's brash and a real spitfire but also desires to open her heart to someone she trusts. It takes a man (or person) that's sure of his masculinity, to embrace these traits, and to make her feel womanly.
środa, 26 lipca 2017
Plan/Spontaneity
this combination of comprehensive scheduling and a willingness to adapt or modify the plan as needed
will likely experience more creative insights than someone who adopts a more
traditionally “spontaneous” approach where the day is left open and unstructured.
Without structure, it’s easy to allow your time to devolve into the shallow—e-mail,
social media, Web surfing. This type of shallow behavior, though satisfying in the
moment, is not conducive to creativity. With structure, on the other hand, you can
ensure that you regularly schedule blocks to grapple with a new idea, or work deeply
on something challenging, or brainstorm for a fixed period—the type of commitment
more likely to instigate innovation.
Deep work Cal Newport
will likely experience more creative insights than someone who adopts a more
traditionally “spontaneous” approach where the day is left open and unstructured.
Without structure, it’s easy to allow your time to devolve into the shallow—e-mail,
social media, Web surfing. This type of shallow behavior, though satisfying in the
moment, is not conducive to creativity. With structure, on the other hand, you can
ensure that you regularly schedule blocks to grapple with a new idea, or work deeply
on something challenging, or brainstorm for a fixed period—the type of commitment
more likely to instigate innovation.
Deep work Cal Newport
wtorek, 25 lipca 2017
Problem with science- strips the world of what makes it not only natural, but beautiful… and fun—the interaction between the stuff!
It is a place where A causes B causes C, epitomized in the formulas of Newtonian physics where all the world is not a stage but a billiard table
The problem is that breaking a system down into its component elements strips the world of what makes it not only natural, but beautiful… and fun—the interaction between the stuff! Life and the perception of life. Live… in the space… between.
(This suggests the biologically inspired mantra “Be in between.”)
The problem is that breaking a system down into its component elements strips the world of what makes it not only natural, but beautiful… and fun—the interaction between the stuff! Life and the perception of life. Live… in the space… between.
(This suggests the biologically inspired mantra “Be in between.”)
niedziela, 23 lipca 2017
Play/gamification
Research on play has shown that it is a way of safely learning other people’s deviance. Play is a way of engineering experiences that reveal assumptions that we then question, unleashing unpredictable results
While play enables one to step into uncertainty and thrive, play alone isn’t a complete tool, as much as a childlike approach to life can be generative for the brain. To survive during evolution, innovation needs more than creation. We also need principle V: Deviate with intention—not just for the sake of deviance (though there can be value in that, too, in terms of a random search strategy). This is essential, and we have a clear example of its significance. What do you get if you add intention to play?
SCIENCE.
start simple (few dimensions), add complexity (more dimensions), and then refine (lose dimensions) through trial and error… and repeat
One must lead with creativity and follow with efficiency… and repeat, not the other way around and not in tandem
Our five senses need contrast in order to make sense of meaningless information; otherwise it stays meaningless
Transitions bring uncertainty: the transition from youth to adulthood, from a familiar home to a new home, single life to married life (and often back again), childless life to parent life, working life to retired life. The key nuance is that innovation moves within the “space between.” It is movement between that is innovation: to be innovative is not to live at the edge of chaos, but to be at the edge of chaos on “average.” What this means in practice is that you must know which phase you’re in at any given moment. The greatest innovators are rarely individuals, but rather groups that embody this tension between creativity and efficiency. In particular, one potentially powerful pairing inside an ecology of innovation is the novice and the expert.
letting them run in the dark (to explore), while providing walls that keep them from running too far, and letting them know with certainty that when they hit a wall and fall down they will be picked back up. Since what a two-year-old wants is to both explore and be held at the same time (as does a teenager, and as does an adult… all of us)
Parenting is about letting children learn how to move between go and stop by building their own history of trial and error, not by adopting yours.
the courage to occupy spaces of uncertainty
While play enables one to step into uncertainty and thrive, play alone isn’t a complete tool, as much as a childlike approach to life can be generative for the brain. To survive during evolution, innovation needs more than creation. We also need principle V: Deviate with intention—not just for the sake of deviance (though there can be value in that, too, in terms of a random search strategy). This is essential, and we have a clear example of its significance. What do you get if you add intention to play?
SCIENCE.
start simple (few dimensions), add complexity (more dimensions), and then refine (lose dimensions) through trial and error… and repeat
One must lead with creativity and follow with efficiency… and repeat, not the other way around and not in tandem
Our five senses need contrast in order to make sense of meaningless information; otherwise it stays meaningless
Transitions bring uncertainty: the transition from youth to adulthood, from a familiar home to a new home, single life to married life (and often back again), childless life to parent life, working life to retired life. The key nuance is that innovation moves within the “space between.” It is movement between that is innovation: to be innovative is not to live at the edge of chaos, but to be at the edge of chaos on “average.” What this means in practice is that you must know which phase you’re in at any given moment. The greatest innovators are rarely individuals, but rather groups that embody this tension between creativity and efficiency. In particular, one potentially powerful pairing inside an ecology of innovation is the novice and the expert.
letting them run in the dark (to explore), while providing walls that keep them from running too far, and letting them know with certainty that when they hit a wall and fall down they will be picked back up. Since what a two-year-old wants is to both explore and be held at the same time (as does a teenager, and as does an adult… all of us)
Parenting is about letting children learn how to move between go and stop by building their own history of trial and error, not by adopting yours.
the courage to occupy spaces of uncertainty
If you want to understand humans or a situation generated by humans, you need to know their assumptions. But don’t ask them! And if you want to understand yourself, sometimes the best answer exists in another person. Studies have shown that other people can be better at predicting our behavior—at usefully predicting us—than we ourselves are
When you fail to predict correctly, however, the opposite of tranquility occurs: You feel negative emotions, and your perception is flooded with all the accompanying sensations. Your assumptions failed you, meaning that a useful predictive perception wasn’t within your space of possibility. Thus, the negativity that you feel upon entering a conflict (with yourself, with another, or with the world) is simply a reflection of the fact that what is happening now is not consistent with what you think “should” be happening; that is, the meanings from the present don’t match past meanings. The interesting thing is that when you are consciously aware of your assumptions going into a situation, even if your assumptions aren’t met, your emotional reaction will be less severe because you weren’t blind to the forces that were shaping your perception in the first place
sobota, 22 lipca 2017
Life hacking
Stephen King wrote Carrie on a makeshift desk set between a washing machine and a dryer. He wrote while his kid cried and his wife banged pots in the nearby kitchen as she prepared dinner.
This should tell you everything you need to know about the requirements of creativity.
Studies come out and tell you that you need to paint your walls a certain color. That you need to sit down at the same place every day (or a different place every day). That you need this or that. Always contradicting, never taking you into consideration.
These studies are concerned with some measurement on some group of people in some study you weren’t involved in.
If you look at the daily rituals of 100 different creative people you’ll find 100 different things that work. For them.
If you know that you must create, then you will. If you feel like you should create, then you’ll find an excuse not to.
When you must create then you have no choice but to find the best environment and ritual for you. These personal environmental hacks are just that: personal.
You must earn the right to hack your creativity. There is no book that can do it for you. No secret method. Just you, honesty, and an aim.
czwartek, 20 lipca 2017
Converting our experiences into data. It isn’t a question of trendiness. It is a question of survival. We must prove to ourselves and to the system that we still have value. And value lies not in having experiences, but in turning these experiences into free-flowing data.
True, for the last 70,000 years or so, human experiences have been the most efficient data-processing algorithms in the universe, hence there was good reason to sanctify them. However, we may soon reach a point when these algorithms will be superseded, and even become a burden
In the eighteenth century, humanism sidelined God by shifting from a deo-centric to a homo-centric world view. In the twenty-first century, Dataism may sideline humans by shifting from a homo-centric to a data-centric view.
When you read the Bible, you get advice from a few priests and rabbis who lived in ancient Jerusalem. In contrast, when you listen to your feelings, you follow an algorithm that evolution has developed for millions of years, and that withstood the harshest quality tests of natural selection. Your feelings are the voice of millions of ancestors, each of whom managed to survive and reproduce in an unforgiving environment. Your feelings are not infallible, of course, but they are better than most alternatives. For millions upon millions of years, feelings were the best algorithms in the world
In the eighteenth century, humanism sidelined God by shifting from a deo-centric to a homo-centric world view. In the twenty-first century, Dataism may sideline humans by shifting from a homo-centric to a data-centric view.
When you read the Bible, you get advice from a few priests and rabbis who lived in ancient Jerusalem. In contrast, when you listen to your feelings, you follow an algorithm that evolution has developed for millions of years, and that withstood the harshest quality tests of natural selection. Your feelings are the voice of millions of ancestors, each of whom managed to survive and reproduce in an unforgiving environment. Your feelings are not infallible, of course, but they are better than most alternatives. For millions upon millions of years, feelings were the best algorithms in the world
Data religion now says that your every word and action is part of the great data flow, that the algorithms are constantly watching you and that they care about everything you do and feel. Most people like this very much. For true-believers, to be disconnected from the data flow risks losing the very meaning of life. What’s the point of doing or experiencing anything if nobody knows about it, and if it doesn’t contribute something to the global exchange of information?
Humanism thought that experiences occur inside us, and that we ought to find within ourselves the meaning of all that happens, thereby infusing the universe with meaning. Dataists believe that experiences are valueless if they are not shared, and that we need not – indeed cannot – find meaning within ourselves.
Civilisation-Dataist
From a Dataist perspective, we may interpret the entire human species as a single data-processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips. If so, we can also understand the whole of history as a process of improving the efficiency of this system, through four basic methods:
1. Increasing the number of processors. A city of 100,000 people has more computing power than a village of 1,000 people.
2. Increasing the variety of processors. Different processors may use diverse ways to calculate and analyse data. Using several kinds of processors in a single system may therefore increase its dynamism and creativity. A conversation between a peasant, a priest and a physician may produce novel ideas that would never emerge from a conversation between three hunter-gatherers.
3. Increasing the number of connections between processors. There is little point in increasing the mere number and variety of processors if they are poorly connected to each other. A trade network linking ten cities is likely to result in many more economic, technological and social innovations than ten isolated cities.
4. Increasing the freedom of movement along existing connections. Connecting processors is hardly useful if data cannot flow freely. Just building roads between ten cities won’t be very useful if they are plagued by robbers, or if some autocratic despot doesn’t allow merchants and travellers to move as they wish.
In the absence of writing and money, humans could not establish cities, kingdoms or empires. Humankind was still (agriculture revolution)divided into innumerable little tribes, each with its own lifestyle and world view
If humankind is indeed a single data-processing system, what is its output? Dataists would say that its output will be the creation of a new and even more efficient data-processing system, called the Internet-of-All-Things. Once this mission is accomplished, Homo sapiens will vanish.
Dataist ought to maximise data flow by connecting to more and more media, and producing and consuming more and more information. Like other successful religions, Dataism is also missionary. Its second commandment is to connect everything to the system, including heretics who don’t want to be connected. And ‘everything’ means more than just humans. It means every thing. My body, of course, but also the cars on the street, the refrigerators in the kitchen, the chickens in their coop and the trees in the jungle – all should be connected to the Internet-of-All-Things. The refrigerator will monitor the number of eggs in the drawer, and inform the chicken coop when a new shipment is needed. The cars will talk with one another, and the trees in the jungle will report on the weather and on carbon dioxide levels. We mustn’t leave any part of the universe disconnected from the great web of life. Conversely, the greatest sin is to block the data flow. What is death, if not a situation when information doesn’t flow? Hence Dataism upholds the freedom of information as the greatest good of all.
As the global data-processing system becomes all-knowing and all-powerful, so connecting to the system becomes the source of all meaning. Humans want to merge into the data flow because when you are part of the data flow you are part of something much bigger than yourself.
Data religion now says that your every word and action is part of the great data flow, that the algorithms are constantly watching you and that they care about everything you do and feel. Most people like this very much. For true-believers, to be disconnected from the data flow risks losing the very meaning of life. What’s the point of doing or experiencing anything if nobody knows about it, and if it doesn’t contribute something to the global exchange of information?
1. Increasing the number of processors. A city of 100,000 people has more computing power than a village of 1,000 people.
2. Increasing the variety of processors. Different processors may use diverse ways to calculate and analyse data. Using several kinds of processors in a single system may therefore increase its dynamism and creativity. A conversation between a peasant, a priest and a physician may produce novel ideas that would never emerge from a conversation between three hunter-gatherers.
3. Increasing the number of connections between processors. There is little point in increasing the mere number and variety of processors if they are poorly connected to each other. A trade network linking ten cities is likely to result in many more economic, technological and social innovations than ten isolated cities.
4. Increasing the freedom of movement along existing connections. Connecting processors is hardly useful if data cannot flow freely. Just building roads between ten cities won’t be very useful if they are plagued by robbers, or if some autocratic despot doesn’t allow merchants and travellers to move as they wish.
In the absence of writing and money, humans could not establish cities, kingdoms or empires. Humankind was still (agriculture revolution)divided into innumerable little tribes, each with its own lifestyle and world view
If humankind is indeed a single data-processing system, what is its output? Dataists would say that its output will be the creation of a new and even more efficient data-processing system, called the Internet-of-All-Things. Once this mission is accomplished, Homo sapiens will vanish.
Dataist ought to maximise data flow by connecting to more and more media, and producing and consuming more and more information. Like other successful religions, Dataism is also missionary. Its second commandment is to connect everything to the system, including heretics who don’t want to be connected. And ‘everything’ means more than just humans. It means every thing. My body, of course, but also the cars on the street, the refrigerators in the kitchen, the chickens in their coop and the trees in the jungle – all should be connected to the Internet-of-All-Things. The refrigerator will monitor the number of eggs in the drawer, and inform the chicken coop when a new shipment is needed. The cars will talk with one another, and the trees in the jungle will report on the weather and on carbon dioxide levels. We mustn’t leave any part of the universe disconnected from the great web of life. Conversely, the greatest sin is to block the data flow. What is death, if not a situation when information doesn’t flow? Hence Dataism upholds the freedom of information as the greatest good of all.
As the global data-processing system becomes all-knowing and all-powerful, so connecting to the system becomes the source of all meaning. Humans want to merge into the data flow because when you are part of the data flow you are part of something much bigger than yourself.
Data religion now says that your every word and action is part of the great data flow, that the algorithms are constantly watching you and that they care about everything you do and feel. Most people like this very much. For true-believers, to be disconnected from the data flow risks losing the very meaning of life. What’s the point of doing or experiencing anything if nobody knows about it, and if it doesn’t contribute something to the global exchange of information?
BILLIONAIRES AND SMALL INTEREST GEOUPS FLOURISH IN TODAY'S CHAOTIC WORLD NOT BECAUSE THEY READ THE MAP BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE, BUT BECAUSE THEY HAVE VERY NARROW AIMS. IN A CHAOTIC SYSTEM, TUNNEL VISION HAS ITS ADVANTAGES AND THE BILLIONAIRES POWER IS STRICTLY PROPORTIONAL TO THEIR GOALS
If the world’s richest man would like to make another billion dollars he could easily game the system in order to achieve his goal. In contrast, if he would like to reduce global inequality or stop global warming, even he won’t be able to do it, because the system is far too complex
Democracy-far behind
Critical choices between alternative web designs weren’t taken through a democratic political process, even though they involved traditional political issues such as sovereignty, borders, privacy and security. Did you ever vote about the shape of cyberspace?
The governmental tortoise cannot keep up with the technological hare
Government has become mere administration. It manages the country, but it no longer leads it. It makes sure teachers are paid on time and sewage systems don’t overflow, but it has no idea where the country will be in twenty years.
The governmental tortoise cannot keep up with the technological hare
Government has become mere administration. It manages the country, but it no longer leads it. It makes sure teachers are paid on time and sewage systems don’t overflow, but it has no idea where the country will be in twenty years.
środa, 19 lipca 2017
Słabi są mięsem, które jedzą silni
In the Artha Siistra, "Textbook on the Art of Winning," which is a classic
Indian treatise on polity believed to have been compiled by Kau!ilya,
xvm The In ner Reaches of Outer Space
the counselor to the founder of the Maurya dynasty, King Chandragupta I
(reigned c. 321-297 B. c.), the moral order by which all life is governed, and
according to which kings and princes are therefore to be advised, is recognized
and expounded as the "Law of the Fish" (matsya-nyiiya), which is,
simply: "The big ones eat the little ones and the little ones have to be numerous
and fast."
that's the problem with solving problems
SOMETIMES COOKIES ARE THE BEST MEDICINE
For hospice patients at death’s door, big existential conversations aren’t always the needed medicine. One oddly powerful alternative is baking cookies together.
“Just the basic joy of smelling a cookie. It smells freaking great. [And it’s like the snowball.] You’re rewarded for being alive and in the moment. Smelling a cookie is not on behalf of some future state. It’s great in the moment, by itself, on behalf of nothing. And this is another thing back to art. Art for its own sake. Art and music and dance. Part of its poignancy is its purposelessness, and just delighting in a wacky fact of perhaps a meaningless universe and how remarkable that is. One way for all of us to live until we’re actually dead is to prize those little moments.”
For hospice patients at death’s door, big existential conversations aren’t always the needed medicine. One oddly powerful alternative is baking cookies together.
“Just the basic joy of smelling a cookie. It smells freaking great. [And it’s like the snowball.] You’re rewarded for being alive and in the moment. Smelling a cookie is not on behalf of some future state. It’s great in the moment, by itself, on behalf of nothing. And this is another thing back to art. Art for its own sake. Art and music and dance. Part of its poignancy is its purposelessness, and just delighting in a wacky fact of perhaps a meaningless universe and how remarkable that is. One way for all of us to live until we’re actually dead is to prize those little moments.”
‘Listen, Google,’
‘Listen, Google,’ I will say, ‘both John and Paul are courting me. I like both of them, but in a different way, and it’s so hard to make up my mind. Given everything you know, what do you advise me to do?’
And Google will answer: ‘Well, I know you from the day you were born. I have read all your emails, recorded all your phone calls, and know your favourite films, your DNA and the entire history of your heart. I have exact data about each date you went on, and if you want, I can show you second-by-second graphs of your heart rate, blood pressure and sugar levels whenever you went on a date with John or Paul. If necessary, I can even provide you with accurate mathematical ranking of every sexual encounter you had with either of them. And naturally enough, I know them as well as I know you. Based on all this information, on my superb algorithms, and on decades’ worth of statistics about millions of relationships – I advise you to go with John, with an 87 per cent probability of being more satisfied with him in the long run.
In exchange for such devoted counselling services, we will just have to give up the idea that humans are individuals, and that each human has a free will determining what’s good, what’s beautiful and what is the meaning of life. Humans will no longer be autonomous entities directed by the stories their narrating self invents. Instead, they will be integral parts of a huge global network.
And Google will answer: ‘Well, I know you from the day you were born. I have read all your emails, recorded all your phone calls, and know your favourite films, your DNA and the entire history of your heart. I have exact data about each date you went on, and if you want, I can show you second-by-second graphs of your heart rate, blood pressure and sugar levels whenever you went on a date with John or Paul. If necessary, I can even provide you with accurate mathematical ranking of every sexual encounter you had with either of them. And naturally enough, I know them as well as I know you. Based on all this information, on my superb algorithms, and on decades’ worth of statistics about millions of relationships – I advise you to go with John, with an 87 per cent probability of being more satisfied with him in the long run.
In exchange for such devoted counselling services, we will just have to give up the idea that humans are individuals, and that each human has a free will determining what’s good, what’s beautiful and what is the meaning of life. Humans will no longer be autonomous entities directed by the stories their narrating self invents. Instead, they will be integral parts of a huge global network.
Future of medical health service
Yet companies such as Google want to go much deeper than wearables. The market for DNA testing is currently growing in leaps and bounds. One of its leaders is 23andMe, a private company founded by Anne Wojcicki, former wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The name ‘23andMe’ refers to the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that contain our genome, the message being that my chromosomes have a very special relationship with me. Anyone who can understand what the chromosomes are saying can tell you things about yourself that you never even suspected.
If you want to know what, pay 23andMe a mere $99, and they will send you a small package with a tube. You spit into the tube, seal it and mail it to Mountain View, California. There the DNA in your saliva is read, and you receive the results online. You get a list of the potential health hazards you face, and your genetic predisposition for more than ninety traits and conditions ranging from baldness to blindness. ‘Know thyself’ was never easier or cheaper. Since it is all based on statistics, the size of the company’s database is the key to making accurate predictions. Hence the first company to build a giant genetic database will provide customers with the best predictions, and will potentially corner the market. US biotech companies are increasingly worried that strict privacy laws in the USA combined with Chinese disregard for individual privacy may hand China the genetic market on a plate.
If we connect all the dots, and if we give Google and its competitors free access to our biometric devices, to our DNA scans and to our medical records, we will get an all-knowing medical health service, which will not only fight epidemics, but will also shield us from cancer, heart attacks and Alzheimer’s
It will definitely know you much better than you know yourself. The self-deceptions and self-delusions that trap people in bad relationships, wrong careers and harmful habits will not fool Google
In exchange for such devoted counselling services, we will just have to give up the idea that humans are individuals, and that each human has a free will determining what’s good, what’s beautiful and what is the meaning of life. Humans will no longer be autonomous entities directed by the stories their narrating self invents. Instead, they will be integral parts of a huge global network
If you want to know what, pay 23andMe a mere $99, and they will send you a small package with a tube. You spit into the tube, seal it and mail it to Mountain View, California. There the DNA in your saliva is read, and you receive the results online. You get a list of the potential health hazards you face, and your genetic predisposition for more than ninety traits and conditions ranging from baldness to blindness. ‘Know thyself’ was never easier or cheaper. Since it is all based on statistics, the size of the company’s database is the key to making accurate predictions. Hence the first company to build a giant genetic database will provide customers with the best predictions, and will potentially corner the market. US biotech companies are increasingly worried that strict privacy laws in the USA combined with Chinese disregard for individual privacy may hand China the genetic market on a plate.
If we connect all the dots, and if we give Google and its competitors free access to our biometric devices, to our DNA scans and to our medical records, we will get an all-knowing medical health service, which will not only fight epidemics, but will also shield us from cancer, heart attacks and Alzheimer’s
It will definitely know you much better than you know yourself. The self-deceptions and self-delusions that trap people in bad relationships, wrong careers and harmful habits will not fool Google
In exchange for such devoted counselling services, we will just have to give up the idea that humans are individuals, and that each human has a free will determining what’s good, what’s beautiful and what is the meaning of life. Humans will no longer be autonomous entities directed by the stories their narrating self invents. Instead, they will be integral parts of a huge global network
Soul what soul? Music written by computer
David Cope is a musicology professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz. He is also one of the more controversial figures in the world of classical music. Cope has written programs that compose concertos, chorales, symphonies and operas. His first creation was named EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), which specialised in imitating the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. It took seven years to create the program, but once the work was done, EMI composed 5,000 chorales à la Bach in a single day. Cope arranged a performance of a few select chorales in a music festival at Santa Cruz. Enthusiastic members of the audience praised the wonderful performance, and explained excitedly how the music touched their innermost being. They didn’t know it was composed by EMI rather than Bach, and when the truth was revealed, some reacted with glum silence, while others shouted in anger.
EMI continued to improve, and learned to imitate Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky. Cope got EMI a contract, and its first album – Classical Music Composed by Computer – sold surprisingly well. Publicity brought increasing hostility from classical-music buffs. Professor Steve Larson from the University of Oregon sent Cope a challenge for a musical showdown. Larson suggested that professional pianists play three pieces one after the other: one by Bach, one by EMI, and one by Larson himself. The audience would then be asked to vote who composed which piece. Larson was convinced people would easily tell the difference between soulful human compositions, and the lifeless artefact of a machine. Cope accepted the challenge. On the appointed date, hundreds of lecturers, students and music fans assembled in the University of Oregon’s concert hall. At the end of the performance, a vote was taken. The result? The audience thought that EMI’s piece was genuine Bach, that Bach’s piece was composed by Larson, and that Larson’s piece was produced by a computer.
Critics continued to argue that EMI’s music is technically excellent, but that it lacks something. It is too accurate. It has no depth. It has no soul. Yet when people heard EMI’s compositions without being informed of their provenance, they frequently praised them precisely for their soulfulness and emotional resonance.
Following EMI’s successes, Cope created newer and even more sophisticated programs. His crowning achievement was Annie. Whereas EMI composed music according to predetermined rules, Annie is based on machine learning. Its musical style constantly changes and develops in reaction to new inputs from the outside world. Cope has no idea what Annie is going to compose next. Indeed, Annie does not restrict itself to music composition but also explores other art forms such as haiku poetry. In 2011 Cope published Comes the Fiery Night: 2,000 Haiku by Man and Machine. Of the 2,000 haikus in the book, some are written by Annie, and the rest by organic poets. The book does not disclose which are which. If you think you can tell the difference between human creativity and machine output, you are welcome to test your claim.18David Cope is a musicology professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz. He is also one of the more controversial figures in the world of classical music. Cope has written programs that compose concertos, chorales, symphonies and operas. His first creation was named EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), which specialised in imitating the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. It took seven years to create the program, but once the work was done, EMI composed 5,000 chorales à la Bach in a single day. Cope arranged a performance of a few select chorales in a music festival at Santa Cruz. Enthusiastic members of the audience praised the wonderful performance, and explained excitedly how the music touched their innermost being. They didn’t know it was composed by EMI rather than Bach, and when the truth was revealed, some reacted with glum silence, while others shouted in anger.
EMI continued to improve, and learned to imitate Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky. Cope got EMI a contract, and its first album – Classical Music Composed by Computer – sold surprisingly well. Publicity brought increasing hostility from classical-music buffs. Professor Steve Larson from the University of Oregon sent Cope a challenge for a musical showdown. Larson suggested that professional pianists play three pieces one after the other: one by Bach, one by EMI, and one by Larson himself. The audience would then be asked to vote who composed which piece. Larson was convinced people would easily tell the difference between soulful human compositions, and the lifeless artefact of a machine. Cope accepted the challenge. On the appointed date, hundreds of lecturers, students and music fans assembled in the University of Oregon’s concert hall. At the end of the performance, a vote was taken. The result? The audience thought that EMI’s piece was genuine Bach, that Bach’s piece was composed by Larson, and that Larson’s piece was produced by a computer.
Critics continued to argue that EMI’s music is technically excellent, but that it lacks something. It is too accurate. It has no depth. It has no soul. Yet when people heard EMI’s compositions without being informed of their provenance, they frequently praised them precisely for their soulfulness and emotional resonance.
Following EMI’s successes, Cope created newer and even more sophisticated programs. His crowning achievement was Annie. Whereas EMI composed music according to predetermined rules, Annie is based on machine learning. Its musical style constantly changes and develops in reaction to new inputs from the outside world. Cope has no idea what Annie is going to compose next. Indeed, Annie does not restrict itself to music composition but also explores other art forms such as haiku poetry. In 2011 Cope published Comes the Fiery Night: 2,000 Haiku by Man and Machine. Of the 2,000 haikus in the book, some are written by Annie, and the rest by organic poets. The book does not disclose which are which. If you think you can tell the difference between human creativity and machine output, you are welcome to test your claim.18
EMI continued to improve, and learned to imitate Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky. Cope got EMI a contract, and its first album – Classical Music Composed by Computer – sold surprisingly well. Publicity brought increasing hostility from classical-music buffs. Professor Steve Larson from the University of Oregon sent Cope a challenge for a musical showdown. Larson suggested that professional pianists play three pieces one after the other: one by Bach, one by EMI, and one by Larson himself. The audience would then be asked to vote who composed which piece. Larson was convinced people would easily tell the difference between soulful human compositions, and the lifeless artefact of a machine. Cope accepted the challenge. On the appointed date, hundreds of lecturers, students and music fans assembled in the University of Oregon’s concert hall. At the end of the performance, a vote was taken. The result? The audience thought that EMI’s piece was genuine Bach, that Bach’s piece was composed by Larson, and that Larson’s piece was produced by a computer.
Critics continued to argue that EMI’s music is technically excellent, but that it lacks something. It is too accurate. It has no depth. It has no soul. Yet when people heard EMI’s compositions without being informed of their provenance, they frequently praised them precisely for their soulfulness and emotional resonance.
Following EMI’s successes, Cope created newer and even more sophisticated programs. His crowning achievement was Annie. Whereas EMI composed music according to predetermined rules, Annie is based on machine learning. Its musical style constantly changes and develops in reaction to new inputs from the outside world. Cope has no idea what Annie is going to compose next. Indeed, Annie does not restrict itself to music composition but also explores other art forms such as haiku poetry. In 2011 Cope published Comes the Fiery Night: 2,000 Haiku by Man and Machine. Of the 2,000 haikus in the book, some are written by Annie, and the rest by organic poets. The book does not disclose which are which. If you think you can tell the difference between human creativity and machine output, you are welcome to test your claim.18David Cope is a musicology professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz. He is also one of the more controversial figures in the world of classical music. Cope has written programs that compose concertos, chorales, symphonies and operas. His first creation was named EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), which specialised in imitating the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. It took seven years to create the program, but once the work was done, EMI composed 5,000 chorales à la Bach in a single day. Cope arranged a performance of a few select chorales in a music festival at Santa Cruz. Enthusiastic members of the audience praised the wonderful performance, and explained excitedly how the music touched their innermost being. They didn’t know it was composed by EMI rather than Bach, and when the truth was revealed, some reacted with glum silence, while others shouted in anger.
EMI continued to improve, and learned to imitate Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky. Cope got EMI a contract, and its first album – Classical Music Composed by Computer – sold surprisingly well. Publicity brought increasing hostility from classical-music buffs. Professor Steve Larson from the University of Oregon sent Cope a challenge for a musical showdown. Larson suggested that professional pianists play three pieces one after the other: one by Bach, one by EMI, and one by Larson himself. The audience would then be asked to vote who composed which piece. Larson was convinced people would easily tell the difference between soulful human compositions, and the lifeless artefact of a machine. Cope accepted the challenge. On the appointed date, hundreds of lecturers, students and music fans assembled in the University of Oregon’s concert hall. At the end of the performance, a vote was taken. The result? The audience thought that EMI’s piece was genuine Bach, that Bach’s piece was composed by Larson, and that Larson’s piece was produced by a computer.
Critics continued to argue that EMI’s music is technically excellent, but that it lacks something. It is too accurate. It has no depth. It has no soul. Yet when people heard EMI’s compositions without being informed of their provenance, they frequently praised them precisely for their soulfulness and emotional resonance.
Following EMI’s successes, Cope created newer and even more sophisticated programs. His crowning achievement was Annie. Whereas EMI composed music according to predetermined rules, Annie is based on machine learning. Its musical style constantly changes and develops in reaction to new inputs from the outside world. Cope has no idea what Annie is going to compose next. Indeed, Annie does not restrict itself to music composition but also explores other art forms such as haiku poetry. In 2011 Cope published Comes the Fiery Night: 2,000 Haiku by Man and Machine. Of the 2,000 haikus in the book, some are written by Annie, and the rest by organic poets. The book does not disclose which are which. If you think you can tell the difference between human creativity and machine output, you are welcome to test your claim.18
wtorek, 18 lipca 2017
Seperate brainspheres experiments + Daniel Kahnemann
The patient reacted by blushing and giggling. ‘What did you see?’ asked the mischievous researchers. ‘Nothing, just a flash of light,’ said the left hemisphere, and the patient immediately giggled again, covering her mouth with her hand. ‘Why are you laughing then?’ they insisted. The bewildered left-hemisphere interpreter – struggling for some rational explanation – replied that one of the machines in the room looked very funny.
The left brain, which controls speech, had no data, and therefore did not really know why the left hand pointed to the shovel. So it just invented something credible. After repeating this experiment many times, Gazzaniga concluded that the left hemisphere of the brain is the seat not only of our verbal abilities, but also of an internal interpreter that constantly tries to make sense of our life, using partial clues in order to concoct plausible stories
Left brain-narrating self, interpreter
Like every journalist, poet and politician, the narrating self takes many short cuts. It doesn’t narrate everything, and usually weaves the story only from peak moments and end results. The value of the whole experience is determined by averaging peaks with ends
It finds the average between the worst part (the water was very cold) and the last moment
Every time the narrating self evaluates our experiences, it discounts their duration, and adopts the ‘peak-end rule’ – it remembers only the peak moment and the end moment, and evaluates the whole experience according to their average
Right brain-experiencing self
Truth be told, the experiencing self and the narrating self are not completely separate entities but are closely intertwined. The narrating self uses our experiences as important (but not exclusive) raw materials for its stories. These stories, in turn, shape what the experiencing self actually feels. We experience hunger differently when we fast on Ramadan, when we fast in preparation for a medical examination, and when we don’t eat because we have no money. The different meanings ascribed to our hunger by the narrating self create very different actual experiences.
Nevertheless, most people identify with their narrating self. When they say ‘I’, they mean the story in their head, not the stream of experiences they undergo. We identify with the inner system that takes the crazy chaos of life and spins out of it seemingly logical and consistent yarns. It doesn’t matter that the plot is full of lies and lacunas, and that it is rewritten again and again, so that today’s story flatly contradicts yesterday’s; the important thing is that we always retain the feeling that we have a single unchanging identity from birth to death (and perhaps even beyond the grave)
The left brain, which controls speech, had no data, and therefore did not really know why the left hand pointed to the shovel. So it just invented something credible. After repeating this experiment many times, Gazzaniga concluded that the left hemisphere of the brain is the seat not only of our verbal abilities, but also of an internal interpreter that constantly tries to make sense of our life, using partial clues in order to concoct plausible stories
Left brain-narrating self, interpreter
Like every journalist, poet and politician, the narrating self takes many short cuts. It doesn’t narrate everything, and usually weaves the story only from peak moments and end results. The value of the whole experience is determined by averaging peaks with ends
It finds the average between the worst part (the water was very cold) and the last moment
Every time the narrating self evaluates our experiences, it discounts their duration, and adopts the ‘peak-end rule’ – it remembers only the peak moment and the end moment, and evaluates the whole experience according to their average
Right brain-experiencing self
Truth be told, the experiencing self and the narrating self are not completely separate entities but are closely intertwined. The narrating self uses our experiences as important (but not exclusive) raw materials for its stories. These stories, in turn, shape what the experiencing self actually feels. We experience hunger differently when we fast on Ramadan, when we fast in preparation for a medical examination, and when we don’t eat because we have no money. The different meanings ascribed to our hunger by the narrating self create very different actual experiences.
Nevertheless, most people identify with their narrating self. When they say ‘I’, they mean the story in their head, not the stream of experiences they undergo. We identify with the inner system that takes the crazy chaos of life and spins out of it seemingly logical and consistent yarns. It doesn’t matter that the plot is full of lies and lacunas, and that it is rewritten again and again, so that today’s story flatly contradicts yesterday’s; the important thing is that we always retain the feeling that we have a single unchanging identity from birth to death (and perhaps even beyond the grave)
Transcranial stimulators
https://www.mrn.org/files/news/Zap_your_brain_into_the_zone__Fast_track_to_pure_focus_-_life_-_06_February_2012_-_New_Scientist.pdf
The attention helmet works a bit like the impatient friend. Of course sometimes – on the battlefield, for instance – people need to take firm decisions quickly. But there is more to life than that. If we start using the attention helmet in more and more situations, we may end up losing our ability to tolerate confusion, doubts and contradictions, just as we have lost our ability to smell, dream and pay attention. The system may push us in that direction, because it usually rewards us for the decisions we make rather than for our doubts. Yet a life of resolute decisions and quick fixes may be poorer and shallower than one of doubts and contradictions.
The attention helmet works a bit like the impatient friend. Of course sometimes – on the battlefield, for instance – people need to take firm decisions quickly. But there is more to life than that. If we start using the attention helmet in more and more situations, we may end up losing our ability to tolerate confusion, doubts and contradictions, just as we have lost our ability to smell, dream and pay attention. The system may push us in that direction, because it usually rewards us for the decisions we make rather than for our doubts. Yet a life of resolute decisions and quick fixes may be poorer and shallower than one of doubts and contradictions.
poniedziałek, 17 lipca 2017
Twerking, nie Twerkingiem
Bartka kolega Ole, z Hamburga, pojechał do Tanzani na wolontariat. Pod koniec wolontariatu został zaproszony na pożegnalną zabawe, atrakcja wieczoru- ognisko, przy którym tutejsi ciągle tańczą. W pewnym momencie tworzy się kółko, wszyscy tańczą w kółku i każdy z obecnych pojedynczo wchodzi do środka i prezentuje swój indywidualny taniec. Kolega Olego także z Niemiec, który był przed nim w kółku stanowczo odmówił. Ole mowił sobie w głowie po cichu- musze to zrobić, musze im pokazać że się staram, że nie jestem jakimś zakutym białasem. Wchodzi to środka, tańczy jak opętany, wymachuje wszystkimi częściami, no rules, słyszy gromkie śmiechy i salwe braw. Gdy już chce kończyć i wracać do kółeczka, na horyzoncie widzi swoją 50cio letnią nauczycielkę z tańzańskiej szkoły, która wchodzi do jego kółeczka, Ole tańczy, nauczycielka się zbliża, staje do niego tyłem i co? i zaczyna ruszać tyłkiem w okolicach środka ciała Ole-popularny Twerking, pierwszy raz odprawia ktoś na Ole Twerking i to jest właśnie jego 50letnia nauczycielka z Tanzani
sobota, 15 lipca 2017
czwartek, 13 lipca 2017
Economic growth as modern religion
Take, for example, a software engineer making $250 per hour working for some hi-tech start-up. One day her elderly father has a stroke. He now needs help with shopping, cooking and even showering. She could move her father to her own house, leave home later in the morning, come back earlier in the evening and take care of her father personally. Both her income and the start-up’s productivity would suffer, but her father would enjoy the care of a respectful and loving daughter. Alternatively, the engineer could hire a Mexican carer who, for $25 per hour, would live with the father and provide for all his needs. That would mean business as usual for the engineer and her start-up, and even the carer and the Mexican economy would benefit. What should the engineer do?
Free-market capitalism has a firm answer. If economic growth demands that we loosen family bonds, encourage people to live away from their parents, and import carers from the other side of the world – so be it. This answer, however, involves an ethical judgement rather than a factual statement. No doubt, when some people specialise in software engineering while others spend their time taking care of the elderly, we can produce more software and give old people more professional care. Yet is economic growth more important than family bonds? By daring to make such ethical judgements, free-market capitalism has crossed the border from the land of science to that of religion.
Free-market capitalism has a firm answer. If economic growth demands that we loosen family bonds, encourage people to live away from their parents, and import carers from the other side of the world – so be it. This answer, however, involves an ethical judgement rather than a factual statement. No doubt, when some people specialise in software engineering while others spend their time taking care of the elderly, we can produce more software and give old people more professional care. Yet is economic growth more important than family bonds? By daring to make such ethical judgements, free-market capitalism has crossed the border from the land of science to that of religion.
środa, 12 lipca 2017
Spiritual journay
Why label such a voyage ‘spiritual’? This is a legacy from ancient dualist religions that believed in the existence of two gods, one good and one evil. According to dualism, the good god created pure and everlasting souls that lived in a wonderful world of spirit. However, the bad god – sometimes named Satan – created another world, made of matter. Satan didn’t know how to make his creation last, hence in the world of matter everything rots and disintegrates. In order to breathe life into his defective creation, Satan tempted souls from the pure world of spirit, and locked them up inside material bodies. That’s what humans are – a good spiritual soul trapped inside an evil material body. Since the soul’s prison – the body – decays and eventually dies, Satan ceaselessly tempts the soul with bodily delights, and above all with food, sex and power. When the body disintegrates and the soul has a chance to escape back to the spiritual world, its craving for bodily pleasures draws it back inside some new material body. The soul thus transmigrates from body to body, wasting its days in pursuit of food, sex and power.
Dualism instructs people to break these material shackles and undertake a journey back to the spiritual world, which is totally unfamiliar to us, but is our true home. During this quest we must reject all material temptations and deals. Due to this dualist legacy, every journey on which we doubt the conventions and deals of the mundane world and walk towards an unknown destination is called ‘a spiritual journey’.
Such journeys are fundamentally different from religions, because religions seek to cement the worldly order whereas spirituality seeks to escape it.
Dualism instructs people to break these material shackles and undertake a journey back to the spiritual world, which is totally unfamiliar to us, but is our true home. During this quest we must reject all material temptations and deals. Due to this dualist legacy, every journey on which we doubt the conventions and deals of the mundane world and walk towards an unknown destination is called ‘a spiritual journey’.
Such journeys are fundamentally different from religions, because religions seek to cement the worldly order whereas spirituality seeks to escape it.
Fiction vs Reality
Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function. We can’t play football unless everyone believes in the same made-up rules, and we can’t enjoy the benefits of markets and courts without similar make-believe stories. But the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality. Then we begin entire wars ‘to make a lot of money for the corporation’ or ‘to protect the national interest’. Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; how come we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service?
Chaos James Gleick / Compexity
-Lorenz discovered that the weather cannot be predicted long term because small disturbances, such as rounding to a wrong decimal or the disturbance of the air by a butterfly, was enough to change weather patterns.
The term butterfly effect refers to the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings can create small changes in the atmosphere, which may alter the path of a tornado
Chaos-“Dynamics freed at last from the shackles of order and predictability…” p.632,5
“Thinking about civilization,” he says, “led me to think about complexity as an entity. How do you compare civilization to something else? Is it like brass? Is it like a frog? How do you answer that question? This is what motivates complex systems.”
The term butterfly effect refers to the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings can create small changes in the atmosphere, which may alter the path of a tornado
Chaos-“Dynamics freed at last from the shackles of order and predictability…” p.632,5
“Thinking about civilization,” he says, “led me to think about complexity as an entity. How do you compare civilization to something else? Is it like brass? Is it like a frog? How do you answer that question? This is what motivates complex systems.”
wtorek, 11 lipca 2017
John Maus on his likes
We just end up saying what is and not saying what's not yet, we just go on talking, idly. Here again, I hate this language, I hate this way of putting it, but on the spot it'll have to suffice - we just kind of say what immediately comes to mind, and we put it up there, and like that - and we don't end up saying anything at all. We don't end up giving, for lack of a better way of putting it, anything about what we are, or what we could potentially become at all, we just kind of end up perpetuating what is. Which isn't to say that the immediate spontaneous automatic writing can't say anything, but usually we should maybe take a moment to look at the immediate automatic spontaneous thing and look at it carefully before sharing it with others, perhaps maybe to be certain and to wager it does.
You know that Badiou quote, he says that all art and all thought is ruined when we accept the situation's imperative to consume, communicate and enjoy.
I agree with the idea that we should work to give ourselves, and try to be as certain as we can, even perhaps to a pitiless degree, so that we're truly giving something else than what already was. Because what already is, babies on fire and shit like that, whole continents dying of disease and everything that we all know, when we all know it's bad. So maybe if we want something different from that it's something we need to struggle pitilessly for, as opposed to consuming, communicating, and enjoying.
poniedziałek, 10 lipca 2017
Information flood vs storytelling
An orientation toward practical interests is characteristic of many born storytellers… This points to the nature of every real story. It contains, openly or covertly, something useful. The usefulness may, in one case, consist in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or maxim. In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today “having counsel” is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others. After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding. To seek this counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story.
The storyteller takes what he tells from experience — his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others.
Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it… The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.
The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.
The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself
Does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again.
The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story.
The storyteller takes what he tells from experience — his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others.
Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it… The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.
The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.
The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself
Does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again.
The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story.
Type A
The archetypal Type A was a person the researchers called “Paul,” whom they described unambiguously:
A very disproportionate amount of his emotional energy is consumed in struggling against the normal constraints of time. “How can I move faster, and do more and more things in less and less time?” is the question that never ceases to torment him. Paul hurries his thinking, his speech and his movements. He also strives to hurry the thinking, speech, and movements of those about him; they must communicate rapidly and relevantly if they wish to avoid creating impatience in him. Planes must arrive and depart precisely on time for Paul, cars ahead of him on the highway must maintain a speed he approves of, and there must never be a queue of persons standing between him and a bank clerk, a restaurant table, or the interior of a theater. In fact, he is infuriated whenever people talk slowly or circuitously, when planes are late, cars dawdle on the highway, and queues form.
Are we living at high speed with athleticism and vigor, or are we stricken by hurry sickness?
The cardiologists, Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, listed a set of personality traits which, they claimed, tend to go hand in hand with one another and also with heart disease. They described these traits rather unappealingly, as characteristics about and around the theme of impatience. Excessive competitiveness. Aggressiveness. “A harrying sense of time urgency.” The Type A idea emerged in technical papers and then formed the basis of a popular book and made its way into dictionaries.
poniedziałek, 3 lipca 2017
http://rafsimons.com/fall17
Fuelled by his love for both rebellious youth cultures and traditional menswear, he emerges in fashion halfway through the nineties, presenting a radically different image of masculinity. Fusing the energy and singularity of teenage subcultures with the sharpness and precision of classical sartorial craft, the look presented by Raf Simons is both inspired by and designed for confident outsiders.
Najpiękniejsza jest Nicke, kiedy się wacha
Piękno niższość
Najpiękniejsza jest Nicke, kiedy się wacha
Piękno niższość
Self-organizing music David Byrne
SELF-ORGANIZING MUSIC
If music is inherent in all things and places, then why not let music play itself? The composer, in the traditional sense, might no longer be necessary. Let the planets and spheres spin. Musician Bernie Krause has just come out with a book about “biophony”—the world of music and sounds made by animals, insects, and the nonhuman environment. Music made by self-organizing systems means that anyone or anything can make it, and anyone can walk away from it. Cage said the contemporary composer “resembles the maker of a camera who allows someone else to take the picture.”12 That’s sort of the elimination of authorship, at least in the accepted sense. He felt that traditional music, with its scores that instruct which note should be played and when, are not reflections of the processes and algorithms that activate and create the world around us. The world indeed offers us restricted possibilities and opportunities, but there are always options, and more than one way for things to turn out. He and others wondered if maybe music might partake of this emergent process. A small device made in China takes this idea one step further. The Buddha Machine is a music player that uses random algorithms to organize a series of soothing tones and thereby create never-ending, non-repeating melodies. The programmer who made the device and organized its sounds replaces the composer, effectively leaving no performer. The composer, the instrument, and the performer are all one machine. These are not very sophisticated devices, though one can envision a day when all types of music might be machine-generated. The basic, commonly used patterns that occur in various genres could become the algorithms that guide the manufacture of sounds. One might view much of corporate pop and hip-hop as being machine-made—their formulas are well established, and one need only choose from a variety of available hooks and beats, and an endless recombinant stream of radio-friendly music emerges. Though this industrial approach is often frowned on, its machine-made nature could just as well be a compliment—it returns musical authorship to the ether. All these developments imply that we’ve come full circle: we’ve returned to the idea that our universe might be permeated with music. I welcome the liberation of music from the prison of melody, rigid structure, and harmony. Why not? But I also listen to music that does adhere to those guidelines. Listening to the Music of the Spheres might be glorious, but I crave a concise song now and then, a narrative or a snapshot more than a whole universe. I can enjoy a movie or read a book in which nothing much happens, but I’m deeply conservative as well—if a song establishes itself within the pop genre, then I listen with certain expectations. I can become bored more easily by a pop song that doesn’t play by its own rules than by a contemporary composition that is repetitive and static. I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea—do I have to choose between the two?
New York, York New
I moved to New York eight years ago and felt at once at home. In the haggard buildings and bloodshot skies, in trains that never stopped running like my racing mind at night, I recognized my insomniac self. If New York were a patient, it would be diagnosed with agrypnia excitata, a rare genetic condition characterized by insomnia, nervous energy, constant twitching, and dream enactment — an apt description of a city that never sleeps, a place where one comes to reinvent himself.
Bill Hayes
Hayes is aglow with generous curiosity — not the greedy kind that makes souvenirs out of otherness but the warm, openhearted kind that seeks to understand and connect
But perhaps, exactly contrary to the stereotype of the hasty New Yorker in a perpetual trance of busyness, every true New Yorker is — must necessarily be — a noticer of things, for this is a city where “beauty comes in unbeautiful ways.”
Bill Hayes
Hayes is aglow with generous curiosity — not the greedy kind that makes souvenirs out of otherness but the warm, openhearted kind that seeks to understand and connect
But perhaps, exactly contrary to the stereotype of the hasty New Yorker in a perpetual trance of busyness, every true New Yorker is — must necessarily be — a noticer of things, for this is a city where “beauty comes in unbeautiful ways.”
niedziela, 2 lipca 2017
Learning any skill Tim Ferriss
The most important lesson of language learning: what you study is more important than how you study.Students are subordinate to materials, much like novice cooks are subordinate to recipes. If you select the wrong material, the wrong textbook, the wrong group of words, it doesn’t matter how much (or how well) you study. It doesn’t matter how good your teacher is. One must find the highest-frequency material.
Material beats method.
Fortunately, as long as you hit the highest-frequency material, I learned that content matters very little.
My panacea, it turned out, was judo textbooks.
Though the vocabulary (think, ingredients) was highly specialized, I eclipsed the grammatical ability of four- and five-year students of Japanese after two months of studying judo. Why? Because the grammar (think, cooking methods) was universal.
The principles transferred to everything.
Is the method effective? Have you narrowed down your material to the highest frequency?
Is the method sustainable? Have you chosen a schedule and subject matter that you can stick with (or at least put up with) until reaching fluency? Will you actually swallow the pill you’ve prescribed yourself?
Selection- do as little as needed, not as much as possible, the fewest changes that get us our desired result
ONE MUST FIND THE HIGHEST FREQUENCY MATERIAL
https://blog.todoist.com/2015/08/11/how-to-learn-anything-a-real-world-guide-to-mastering-any-new-skill/
sobota, 1 lipca 2017
Dola pisania
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together
Demokracja w Argentynie, w stylu amerykańskim
"W Ameryce, nie ma tak wyraźnego przedziału między człowiekiem pracy fizycznej a inteligentem. To raz. A po wtóre, że nie ma biedy, która klasę niższą czyni człowiekiem innego gatunku. To dwa. Robotnik w Argentynie- czy pracownik rolny- mówi tym samym językiem co inteligent, chodzi w butach i w kapeluszu, ma zegarek, pali te same papierosy, a przy niedzieli jest w ogóle nie do odróżnienia. Toteż, gdy się przyjeżdża tutaj z Polski, ma się wrażenie, że nie ma proletariatu i to jest źródłem rzeczywiście wielkiej ulgi.(...) To jest demokracja w stylu amerykańskim i trudno tego nie zauważyć w tysiącu codziennych szczegółów. Pewien dziennikarz polski, z dawna tu zamieszkały, dziś już nieżyjący, mawiał, że w Argentynie można najnędzniejszego proletariusza zaprosić do najlepszej restauracji "bez żenady". To bez żenady miało dwojaki sens i oznaczało, że ani osoba zapraszająca nie będzie miała powodu do zażenowania, ani też proletariusz nie będzie ani troszkę onieśmielony. Było to w pierwszych latach mojego pobytu a Ameryce- podałem w wątpliwość to twierdzenie mego towarzysza, a właśnie spożywaliśmy kolację w restauracji, może nie pierwszorzędnej, ale w każdym razie niezłej. I wszedł gazeciarz, dość obszarpany, w brudnawym stwetrze i płóciennych pantoflach na bosych nogach. Mój dziennikarz zawołał go i kupiwszy gazetę, oraz przedstawiwszy mnie jako gringo (cudzoziemiec) , zaprosił do kompanii. Cóż powiecie? Gazeciarz odłożył gazety, przysiadł się, jak najswbodniej gawędził, żartował, podjadł sobie jak należy i napił się jak trzeba, a nie przyszło mu nawet do głowy, zabepieczać się przed naszą wyższością powiedzeniami w rodzaju "ja,prosty człowiek" albo "na mój głupi rozum", albo panowie uczeni to lepiej wiedzą. Demokracja tutaj to przede wszystkim brak nieśmiałości. Człowiek nie wstydzi się swojej sytuacji. Nie mam siebie za nadmiernie jowiszową postać, ale przypuszczam, że gdybym w kraju rozmawiał z uczniami, powiedzmy, z siódmej klasy, czy ze studentami, mieliby przynajmniej z początku trochę tremy, że to niby pisarz,literat,intelektualista,podróżnik itd. A tutejszy szczeniak zupełnie się nie przejmuje, choćby na Einsteina trafił... Co zresztą dowodzi że argentyńska kultura jest monotonna i równa, jak stół, czyli inczaj mówiąc, płaska" ? O_0 ? i co teraz?
"Więc pani naprawdę myśli, że więcej równości w kapitalistycznej Argentynie niż w socjalistycznej Polsce?
-Och nie całkiem... Pod pewnymi względami. Chciałam tylko powiedzieć, że ich (Polaków-podpowiem) równość jest....jak to się mówi?...pryncypialna...A nasza może nieporządna, przypadkowa...ale bardziej naturalna"
Gombrowicz, Wspomnienia polskie, 1977
"Więc pani naprawdę myśli, że więcej równości w kapitalistycznej Argentynie niż w socjalistycznej Polsce?
-Och nie całkiem... Pod pewnymi względami. Chciałam tylko powiedzieć, że ich (Polaków-podpowiem) równość jest....jak to się mówi?...pryncypialna...A nasza może nieporządna, przypadkowa...ale bardziej naturalna"
Gombrowicz, Wspomnienia polskie, 1977
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