Temp work. Dayshift this week. A little bored. Was thinking of Borden's journal from The Prestige. I'm not crazy obsessive enough to do a rotating transposition cipher, but so now I'm working on learning Rot13 well enough to write it freehand, no lookup.
Alain de Botton's Atheism 2.0 TED talk
Everyone seems to be missing the point here. Jerry Coyne scoffs, PZ Myers mocks teaching by repetition. Admittedly there are some clangers, but the basic idea has merit. Seems inevitable, really, that secular humanism will evolve its own traditions, so why not get started now? And I loved Neal Stephenson's Anathem, I'd sign up for a Unarian stint in a heartbeat. What cog sci's learning about debiasing and "mental hygiene" indicates a kind of monk-like asceticism can be useful.
Watching The Secret World of Arrietty. Studio Ghibli, purveyors of the finest, most wondrous... Luddite propaganda on the planet. Of course I love Totoro and Spirited Away, but still. Cognitive bias hath power to assume a pleasing shape. After rationality and narrative fallacy, what are we left with? How do we get from magical thinking to the magic of reality? What's left of Watership Down, after we unweave the rainbow? Well, maybe we're left with Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, or close enough. Closer to realism, our plugs fit.
In Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan, the charaters on a distant space station are 2 millimeters tall, to save space and resources. Justification. Already, watching Arrietty, I think, eh, water droplets and sugar grains don't work like that at that scale.
Marginalia, then and now.
So, Okular works for PDF commenting, even better than Foxit. Annotating's a big deal for me, my books always have underlinings and scribbled comments. Like Heinlein said, once an editor pees on the work, then he likes the smell better.
I learned the trick from an old copy of Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy, found an old yellowing hardcover edition when I was a kid, used to belong to an aunt or a grandfather, had a lot of notes. It was fascinating, going through Durant's text itself, and seeing the marks and traces of a sharp mind that had gone before me.
Currently reading Transmetropolitan, and annotating my way through Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
I learned the trick from an old copy of Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy, found an old yellowing hardcover edition when I was a kid, used to belong to an aunt or a grandfather, had a lot of notes. It was fascinating, going through Durant's text itself, and seeing the marks and traces of a sharp mind that had gone before me.
Currently reading Transmetropolitan, and annotating my way through Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
No PDF commenting on Ubuntu? Boo!
I wanna comment on PDFs, great way to find your way around a dense text and maintain your train of thought. But apparently there aren't any Ubuntu PDF readers with commenting features. Foxit reader for linux, no commenting feature; Adobe Reader 9, no commenting feature. Google results for Ubuntu pdf comments kicks up stuff from 2007, 2008.
Bleah. Shouldn't be fidding with software while drunk. Tanduay Ice is tasty. Seems I can type okay though.
Bleah. Shouldn't be fidding with software while drunk. Tanduay Ice is tasty. Seems I can type okay though.
Parrondo's paradox and evolutionary group selection?
Was reading the haystack model of group selection, and it struck me that Parrondo's paradox seems applicable.
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