The plan: to make a collection of thoughts, inspirations, and interests that particularly define my life.
Inspired by Buster Benson's Codex Vitae.
- 2016
Articles:
- Life Lessons after 10 Years - Better Explained
- Richard Feynman on the True Meaning of Phyisc - Omni Magazine
- The Ideology is Not the Movement
- Your Life in Weeks - Wait but Why
- The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel - Idle Words
- The Post-Productive Economy - KK
- Programming Sucks - Still Drinking
- What is Code? - Bloomberg
- What Does Any of This Have To Do with Physics? - Nautilus
Essays:
- The Relativity of Wrong - Isaac Asimov
Books:
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig
- The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
- Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
- Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
- How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia - Mohsin Hamid
- The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
- The Art of War - Sun Tzu
- Vagabonding - Rolf Potts
- Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki - Haruki Murakami
Films:
- The Iron Giant
- Nightcrawler
- Howl's Moving Castle
- Birdman
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Babel
- Children of Men
- The Revenant
- Interstellar
- Sicario
- Cloud Atlas
Clips:
- Autumn Leaves - Chet Baker & Paul Desmond Together
- One Week in Japan
- Pulp Fiction, Opening Scene
- SpaceX Lands Falcon 9 on Drone Ship
- The Explanation of a Hero
- Clapping for all the Wrong Reasons
Some things are (at least for now) unknowable.
Think bottom up, not top down. Since brains are incredibly creative and very good at creating patterns where there are none, it's very important to think from the bottom up. That is, you should never start with an idea and then find reasons why it is true. Instead, you should start with things you are certain to be true and follow them to their logical conclusion with as few assumptions as possible.
Local peaks. A local peak is a small hill next to a hundred other small hills, next to a few medium mountains, and a bit aways from the towering Everest. It’s getting really damn good at walking to the end of your driveway but never trying to run a mile. It’s the entire concept of steampunk. It’s obsessing over getting better and better at your job without really thinking if it’s the right job for you.
Light cones. A light cone is two vertically opposing cones attached at their narrowest point to form an hourglass shape. The point where they meet is the present, upwards (and vertically into the center of the top cone) is the future, and downwards (and vertically into the center of the bottom cone) is the past. The shape of the cones represents the range of light that is at some point processed by you (or your eyes) - the dot where the cones meet is the present (you only see light that happened to meet your eyes at that instant moment), and the further you go into the future or past the greater the radius of the respective cones increases, representing the distance light travels over that period. I like this concept because it reminds you (me) that our entire perception of our world is just a dot. A single, tiny dot of whatever light happened to bounce from all over the universe and happened to end up at our eyes at that exact instant in time.
Kids are the same everywhere in the world. Seriously, they are. Adults might have changed behavior due to culture or upbringing or education, but look at a group of happy kids anywhere in the entire world and they’re exactly the same. Madly smiling, running about, screaming silly things, enjoying their wild imaginations, and wondering at every new thing they see.
Human opinion and actions do not create truths. In other words, there is no correlation between the effort put into maintaining a belief and the validity of the belief itself. If someone goes through great difficulties to uphold something they belief, it does not make it more or less true — beliefs should always be judged on their own merit.
Never, ever, forget the sunk cost fallacy. Following the previous assertion, you should never continue to cling to a belief if you discover something that falsifies it. It does not matter how long you've believed something or how much effort you have put into believing it. This is easy to understand in concept but incredibly difficult to practice.