People love cyclic and regenerating universes — reincarnation, royal / superhero families of father to son, extreme quantum fluctuation initiating a new Big Bang, etc. — because they appeal to our sense of narrative. They also appeal to our intuition for causality seen in most phenomena +
Maybe the only method to “upgrade” the human civilization is to implement mandatory annual reasoning, understanding and culture tests… worldwide? Each year, your understanding of the standard physics model, basic math, logic, chemistry, biology, psychology and economics are tested. With terrible, terrible consequences if you +
While money can buy you time, time is the opposite of capital. Capital is self-reproducing and durable. Time is self-annihilating and fleeting. Capital is limitless, although constrained. Time is limited to ≈80 years. Don’t waste your time. Waste capital instead. +
“The emergency shutdown system at Chernobyl had a fatal flaw. At 01:23:40, Akimov engages AZ-5, or SCRAM. The fully withdrawn control rods begin moving back into the reactor. These rods are made of boron, which reduces reactivity… but not the tips. The tips are made +
Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are platforms run by multi-billion-dollar companies with near infinite resources, best research and development teams, top neuroscientists and unscrupulous user interface designers. Huge companies working to make your experience on social media as sticky and addictive as possible. To take over +
Blessed are those whose purpose and enjoyment is to repair and restore, rebuild and recover, for everything in this Universe decays and crumbles. +
Artists with a large and diverse network of contacts are most likely to be famous, regardless of how creative their art is. Specifically, the greatest predictor of fame for an artist is to have a network of contacts from various countries. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-artists-famous-friends-originality-work +
Apple: Would you like to install iOS updates automatically? Me: No. Apple: There’s a major 1.0 update of iOS, would you like to install it now? Me: No. Apple: Enter your passcode and we’ll install an update of iOS overnight. Me: Cancel that! I said +
Energy is what constitutes and organizes matter (and antimatter ? ). Prana is an Earth-local, Vedic special interpretation of it. Money is an Earth-local, economic interpretation of it. Follow the money and you’ll follow the energy that constitutes and organizes matter. If you really want +
Nobody will remember if your film / book / design was late and over-budget… But everyone will remember if it was bad. Finance for the long term. Yeah, despite the capitalist preference for the short-term quarterly reports. ? Harder? Sure. But worth it in the +
For all practical purposes, we, as a species, already possess all the information needed for health, beauty, self-realization, spiritual growth, social harmony… And yet, how many of us are healthy / happy / grown-up / self-realized? Less than 0,05%? Why? Is it lack of access +
I remember when Red Hat was still a startup… and me installing our own custom Red Hat Linux 7 Servers in… uhmm… 2001. Now it’s a 34 billion USD purchase by IBM. +
“Humans have this remarkable ability to know and not to know at the same time. Or more correctly, they can know something when they really think about it, but most of the time they don’t think about it, so they don’t know it. If you +
People rely on celebrities for personality templates, which is why celebrity deaths hit them so hard. +
The redundancy required by human language-based communication is so inelegant and inefficient. Take attribution for example. The requirements to state “I think that” for each sentence that expresses the opinion of the orator… of course most of the statements are personal opinions, don’t you think? +
Speaking of film market imbalance… The 2018 Cannes film festival and market has seen 12 411 participants from 114 countries, of which: 980 — festival programmers 1 743 — buyers 3 858 — producers +
Saw the premiere in Cannes… A rather weird alternative rendition of an (imagined?) fleeting romance of legendary Russian pop-rock singer Viktor Tsoi in the 1980s Saint Petersburg. Hipsterish B&W, “It Never Happened” announcements, 4th wall pokes, awkward handwriting notes on the screen… I much prefer +
Remember the “married people are happier on average than singles” stat? Well, it could be that the direction of causation is actually reversed: happiness _causes_ marriage. Higher levels of serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin bring about and maintain a marriage. ;) +
Projection quality in most cinemas today is, alas, quite bad. If you think seeing a movie on a “big screen” is “the best cinematic experience”… well, sorry to disappoint you. On average, what you see in theaters worldwide, including in supposedly top-notch multiplexes in world +
So… I’m debugging someone else’s JavaScript code… and remembered this quote from somewhere: “Document my code? Why do you think it’s called ‘code’?” Argh… I always document my own code. Cause, even several projects later, which can be as little as 1 month… I can’t +
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