Things I Like(d) @charliestigler - Tumblr Blog

The log-normal implies that a small systematic increase or decrease in each factor, analogous to being more careful & proactive in general about maintenance and risk, can cause a large difference in final outcome (Shockley 1957). One must expect the unexpected, and a failure to ‘sweat the small stuff’ means you are allowing brush to pile up in the forest: one match could set it ablaze. People who do not sweat the small stuff have a remarkable tendency to have ‘bad luck’ and somehow keep getting into trouble, much like the less intelligent suffer more ‘accidents’ or natural disasters have death tolls almost entirely determined by poverty—certainly, time & chance may happeneth to us all, but our preparations & reactions play an even greater role in determining how far things go.

Gwern, “Socks”

'I’ve had an idea,’' I said. 'Listen, if you get what you want in Heaven, then what about wanting to be someone who never gets tired of eternity?' I sat back, feeling a touch smug. To my surprise she nodded, almost encouragingly. 'You’re welcome to have a go,' Margaret said. […] 'People have tried it already,' she said, in a clearly sympathetic tone, as if she really didn’t want to hurt me. 'And what’s the problem? What’s the but?' 'Well, there seems to be a logical difficulty. You can’t become someone else without stopping being who you are. Nobody can bear that. It’s what we find, anyway,' she added, half implying that I might be the first person to crack this problem. 'Someone – someone who must have been keen on sports, like you, said that it was changing from being a runner to being a perpetual motion machine. After a while you simply want to run again. Does that make sense?'

Julian Barnes, “A History of the World in 10½ Chapters”

'The idea is to create “a deeper and deeper emotional connection,' Sofman said. 'And if you neglect him, you feel the pain of that.' When he told me this, I felt a flash of not-quite-anger. It seemed almost cruel to design a robot that could play on a young kid’s emotions. And I had never considered that, in the coming human–robot conflagration, robots might take over simply by expertly manipulating us into letting them win. Turkle has more-pointed concerns. She finds the notion of children empathizing with robots troublesome and quite possibly dangerous. Kids need connections to real people in order to mature emotionally. 'Pretend empathy does not do the job,' she told me. If relationships with smart toys crowd out those with friends or family, even partially, we might see 'children growing up without the equipment for empathic connection. You can’t learn it from a machine.'

Alexis C. Madrigal, “Should Children Form Emotional Bonds With Robots?”

There’s nothing they need, nothing they don’t own already, nothing they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious” inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this significant – a Scratch Off World wall map. They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second, embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth they’re in landfill. For thirty seconds of dubious entertainment, or a hedonic stimulus that lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission the use of materials whose impacts will ramify for generations.

George Monbiot, “The Gift of Death”

That many top college graduates hesitate to join a profession with low wages is no great surprise. For many years, talented women had few career alternatives to nursing and teaching; this kept teacher quality artificially high. Now that women have more options, if we want to attract strong teachers, we need to pay competitive salaries. As one observer put it, if you cannot find someone to sell you a Lexus for a few dollars, that doesn’t mean there is a car shortage.

Erika Christakis, “The War on Public Schools”

It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity. Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die - and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.

Stephen Jay Gould, “The Median Isn’t the Message”

Every faith practice has a different form of comfort to offer in the face of loss, and each is useful. Sometimes it helps to dwell on the immensity of the universe. Sometimes it helps to feel the presence of ongoing family and community. Sometimes it helps to light a candle and say a prayer. Sometimes it helps to sit and breathe.

Adam Gopnik, “What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can’t”

Then there’s the shrug-and-grin argument that everyone believes something. Is it fair to object that most of us take quantum physics on faith, too? Well, we don’t take it on faith. We take it on trust, a very different thing. We have confidence—amply evidenced by the technological transformation of the world since the scientific revolution, and by the cash value of validated predictions based on esoteric mathematical abstraction—that the world picture it conveys is true, or more nearly true than anything else on offer.

Adam Gopnik, “What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can’t”

I am very pleased that you find joy with the piano. This and carpentry are in my opinion for your age the best pursuits, better even than school. Because those are things which fit a young person such as you very well. Mainly play the things on the piano which please you, even if the teacher does not assign those. That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes. I am sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget about the noon meal...

Albert Einstein, letter to his son Hans Albert, qtd. by Brain Pickings

my mother, poor fish, wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile! why don't you ever smile?" and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw

Charles Bukowski, “A Smile to Remember”

It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.

Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness”

It is breathtaking, the extinguishing of consciousness. Yet that loss, too—our own ultimate unbeing—is dwarfed by the grander scheme. When we are experiencing it, loss often feels like an anomaly, a disruption in the usual order of things. In fact, though, it is the usual order of things. Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees and backs and memories, the childhood friend, the husband of fifty years, the father of forever, the keys to the house, the keys to the car, the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom itself: sooner or later, all of it drifts into the Valley of Lost Things. There’s precious little solace for this, and zero redress; we will lose everything we love in the end. But why should that matter so much? By definition, we do not live in the end: we live all along the way. The smitten lovers who marvel every day at the miracle of having met each other are right; it is finding that is astonishing. You meet a stranger passing through your town and know within days you will marry her. You lose your job at fifty-five and shock yourself by finding a new calling ten years later. You have a thought and find the words. You face a crisis and find your courage. All of this is made more precious, not less, by its impermanence.

Kathryn Schulz, “When Things Go Missing”

there are people so tired so strafed so mutilated by love or no love that buying a bargain can of tuna in a supermarket is their greatest moment their greatest victory

Charles Bukowski, “the crunch”

I have a catalogue of everyone’s most wonderful idiosyncratic behaviors and gestures, sounds and sayings, and I horde them in a beautiful cave in my heart, and I never let them know.

Katie Tandy, “The Dirty Politics of Period Sex”

Once when I became concerned because others around me practiced all day long, I asked [my professor] how many hours I should practice, and he said, ‘It really doesn’t matter how long. If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty.

Nathan Milstein, qtd. by K. Anders Ericsson et al. in “The Making of an Expert”

Barn's burnt down -- now I can see the moon.

Mizuta Masahide

In February 1990, I was looking out the window of my room in San Francisco's Kaiser Hospital. The day before, I had had surgery for colon cancer. The oncologist had given me a 50-50 chance to live. Across the street was the stucco wall of a dreary little house, in front of which extended the almost-bare branch of a scraggly tree. It was the most beautiful view I have ever seen. It was a view of the world, which I loved and desperately wanted to stay in.

Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

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