Nuggets of gold
The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.
Stephen FryFor every subtel and compicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong.
H. L. Mecken (slightly rephrased)Growing specialization and diversification have brought a host of monographs and textboks on increasingly specialized topics. However, the 'tree' of knowledge of mathematics and related fields does not grow only by putting forth new branches. It also happens, quite often in fact, that branches which were thought to be completely different...
Marian Vajtersic, (in preface to Algorithms for Elliptic Problems)Democracy may be a rickety old thing, but it truely is "the worst political system except for all the others."
Mum, quoting ChurchillIn 1972, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the impact of the French Revolution. “Too early to say,” he replied.
Zhou EnlaiSomebody at one of these places [...] asked me: 'What do you do? How do you write, create?' You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: *not* to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or, if you like its look, you make a pet out of it.
Charles BukowskiBears are just guys.
SigBeautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one--- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than right now
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
Python CommandmentsDo not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in the quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave bereft
I am not there. I have not left.
Mary Elizabeth FryeAfter all, if one is seeking peace one can find it very easily. One can devote oneself blindly to some kind of cause, to an idea, and take shelter there. Surely that does not solve the problem. Mere isolation in an enclosing idea is not a release from conflict. [...]
Self knowledge has no end - you don't come to an achievement, you don't come to a conclusion. It is an endless river. As one studies it, as one goes into it more and more, one finds peace. [...]
If I want to understand somebody, I cannot condemn him: I must observe, study him. I must love the very thing I am studying. If you want to understand a child, you must love and not condemn him. You must play with him, watch his movements, his idiosyncrasies, his ways of behaviour; but if you merely condemn, resist or blame him, there is no comprehension of the child. Similarly to understand what is, one must observe what one thinks, feels and does from moment to moment. That is the actual. Any other action, any ideal or ideological action, is not the actual; it is merely a wish, a fictitious desire to be something other than what is.
To understand what is requires a state of mind in which there is no identification or condemnation, which means a mind that is alert and yet passive. We are in that state when we really desire to understand something; when the intensity of interest is there, that state of mind comes into being. When one is interested in understanding what is, the actual state of the mind, one does not need to force, discipline, or control it; on the contrary, there is passive alertness, watchfulness. This state of awareness comes when there is interest, the intention to understand.
J. Krishnamurti in The first and last FreedomTomorow, and tomorow, and tomorow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Shakespere in Macbethif the personal computer is truly a new medium then the use of it would actually change the thought patterns of an entire civilization
Alan Kay 1989Zen is the essence of all that is good in the daily life of ordinary people. But that does not mean that we are not to smash it flat if we get the slightest opportunity. And we are not going to attack foxy (false) Zen, or the hypocrites and time-servers who support it, but Zen itself in its highest and sublimest forms. Nothing is sacred but one's own foolish and contradictory intuitions. By "intuition" is meant here that which I myself find in common with all so-called "great men" without exception, and with a good many "little" men. It is thus purely subjective, dangerous, and indeed variable, but the great thing is to have courage, and say again and again, "All that can be shaken shall be shaken!" and if nothing remains, let it be so.
R. H. Blyth 27 Aug. 1959Crab: It seems to me that ants are free only within certain constraints. For example, they are free to wander, to brush against each other, to pick up small items, to work on trails, and so on. But they never step out of that small world, that ant-system, which they are in. It would never occur to them, for they don't have the mentality to imagine anything of the kind. Thus the ants are very reliable components, in the sense that you can depend on them to perform certain kinds of tasks in certain ways.
Achilles: But even so, within those limits they are still free, and they just act at random, running about incoherently without any regard for the thought mechanisms of a higher-level being which Dr. Anteater asserts they are merely components of.
Douglas Hofstadter (in GEB)Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
Alan WattsThe road to hell is paved with good intentions. (english proverb)
A person of good intention looks to change the world. A person of good character looks within.On the Ads CFT correspondance
In the domain of high energy physics, the curvature of spacetime is so small it hardly matters. Well at least this is what people thought for a long time. Till Maldacena came up with his Ads CFT correspondance. Maldacena showed that a computation in high energy physics which is QFT, which has nothing to do with gravity, can alternatively be derived from Einstein theory. Which means that, people who thought they would never need gravity to understand quantum field theory where completely taken aback because you can either do a very hard computation in QFT, can be captured by a very simple computation in Einstein's theory. In fact an impossible question in the QFT side, can be done in one line on the gravity side. His version is called Ads / CFT correspondance, Ads is a very special gravity and CFT is a very special quantum field theory. But you can generalize it to guage theory and gravity correspondence.
So people who thought 'okay we'll never need einstein theory of gravity', and then they where stuck at very difficult questions in quantum field thoery that they couldn't figure out how to solve this thing. And out came this relationship where years and years where spent with no progress in QFT became a one line excersize on this side (puts mouse over ETh). So people who thought they would never need Einstein gravity had to go back and start learning GR, and you suddenly see in the ArXiv many of the people of QFT are now writing papers on GR, because they have now learned GR. So that you know that just because a subject is esoteric doesn't mean it's not useful.
On the ultraviolet catastrophe
According to the classical theory of radiation, if each Fourier mode of the equilibrium radiation (in an otherwise empty cavity with perfectly reflective walls) is considered as a degree of freedom capable of exchanging energy, then, according to the equipartition theorem of classical physics, there would be an equal amount of energy in each mode. Since there are an infinite number of modes, this would imply infinite heat capacity, as well as a nonphysical spectrum of emitted radiation that grows without bound with increasing frequency, a problem known as the ultraviolet catastrophe.
Keshav DasguptaWhat I didn't realize is that the structure of the Universities was that they were either hitting steady-state or growing very little or shrinking and that was a not a healthy place to be. Most of the good seats in the musical chairs competition had already been foudn in the 60s and they had occupants and we were in some sort of a game where we were doing work for the system but we weren't set to inherit it. [...] Even though I wanted to do science rather than technology, it's better to be in an expanding world and not quite in exactly the right field, than to be in a contracting world where people's worst behavior comes out and your mind is grooved in defensive and rent-seeking types of ways. [...] If you take Hydra - they may come in a - these tiny microscopic animals - they come in a sexual variety and a sexless variety. It always seems to be that the thing that reproduces sexually senesces and gets old and dies. But sometimes the thing that doesn't reproduce sexually seems to have some sort of immortality properties. So there's some relationship between sex and death that we don't quite understand. [...] Schrodinger (Erwin), didn't really contribute into physics I think until his 40s and 50s, which was very late by the standards of the day. So sometimes you, at a personal level, you just have to get lucky in order to understand what it is that you're supposed to be doing. [..] There was a news story that moved me and a lot of other people about a father who knew he was dying and came up with five years worth of birthday cards and flowers to send to the daughter, who then turned 21. She was sad that this was the last one she was getting. I thought, why is this a news story? Why aren’t we all doing this? Why only five years? And I read this story and I still didn’t do anything about it. So I think that, in some sense, if you guys want to lead the way and talk about how we play with death, rather than whistling past the graveyard, how we dance past it, and how we you know develop a more mature relationship, how we get excited about planning our wake, and thinking about the order of people we want to speak, and you know what we want to reveal years after we’re gone so that we can continue to have these conversations. [...] So just try to try to think about the fact that death is simply part of a program that is already immortal, which is the theory of lineage. Whether it’s the lineage of your ideas or the lineage of your genes, these things matter to all of us while we’re here and it’s one of the most exciting things to think about
Eric Weinstein
Note: I don't really like Eric Weinstein, nor do I endorse his quote. I include it here because it's striking, and it introduced me to a novel perspective.Bohr has brought to my attention that the uncertainty in our observation does not arise exclusively from the occurrence of discontinuities, but is tied directly to the demand that we ascribe equal validity to the quite different experiments which show up in the particulate theory on one hand, and the wave theory on the other hand.
Heisenberg Paper, footnote
I like this quote because it reveals something about how physics was done back then.We must learn to love. This is our experience of music: we must first learn to hear, make out and distinguish a figure and a melody at all, to isolate and demarcate it as a living thing in its own right; then it requires a certain amount of effort and goodwill for us to tolerate it despite its strangeness; we need to exercise patience towards its aspect and expression, and generosity of spirit towards what is odd about it - finally there comes a time when we are accustomed to it, have come to expect it, and we begin to suspect that we would miss it if it were gone; and now it continues to work its irresisteible magic on us more and more, and does not stop until we have become its abject and enraptured lovers, who want nothing more from the world than to experience it again and again.
Nietzsche (334)In physics you get the best of both worlds. You get to be a bad engineer, bad computer scientist, and bad mathematician.
Grand Pooper (Samuel)It's a game. It's the world of illusion. A tactic percieved is no tactic. I care but not that much.
Herb Cohen on negotiationNothing gives a person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
Thomas JeffersonThe last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
Blaise Pascal (1623-62)There where many red hearing in this question. This is a very trivial problem.
Keshav DasguptaNothing useless can be truly beautiful.
William MorrisDefinition: A bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.[...]
Most people who do a great deal of harm in the world are protected against the knowledge that they do so.
David Graeber - Bullshit JobsI do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.
Nikola TeslaHow long does it take to be good at something? To master a cognitively complex task whether it's playing chess at an elite level or being a brain surgeon or a classical music composer or a good computer programer requires, seemingly without exception, 10000 hours deliberate practice. 10000 hours is roughly four hours a day for 10 years. So you need to put in that kind of time before you can achieve an elite status.
Quick maths, this is equivalent to:
- 1h/day 5 days a week for 40 years
- 10h/week for 20 years
- 4h/day 5 days a week for 10 years
- 8h/day 5 days a week for 5 years
- 12h/day 5days a week for 3 years (Rosie's undergrad)
- 14h/day 7 days a week for 2 years (Josh Waitzkin learning Tai Che)
Malcolm GladwellOne thing I have learned as a competitor is that there is a clear distinction between what it takes to be decent, what it takes to be good, what it takes to be great and what it takes to be among the best
Josh WaitzkinThe first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary.
EdisonAthens Athens ATHENS
whoo, nice
I think I have to litter
MichaelThe law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
Sir Arthur EddingtonHaiku and waka poems convey perhaps more easily than painting the subtle differences between the four moods of sabi, wabi, aware, and yugen. The quiet, thrilling loneliness of sabi is obvious in
On a withered branch
A crow is perched,
In the autumn evening.
But it is less obvious and therefore deeper in
With the evening breeze,
The water laps against
The heron's legs.
In the dark forest
A berry drops:
The sound of the water.
Sabi is, however, loneliness in the sense of Bhuddhist detachment, of seeing all things happening "by themselves" in miraculous spontaneity. With this goes that sense of deep, illimitable quietude which descends with a long fall of snow, swallowing all sounds in layer upon layer of softness.
Sleet falling;
Fathomless, infinite
Loneliness.
Wabi, the unexpected recognition of the faithful "suchness" of very ordinary things, especially when the gloom of the future has momentarily checked our ambitiousness, is perhaps the mood of
A brushwood gate,
And for a lock-
This snail.
The woodpecker
Keeps on in the same place:
Day is closing.
Winter desolation;
In the rain-water tub,
Sparrows are walking.
Aware is not quite grief, and not quite nostalgia in the usual sense of longing for the return of a beloved past. Aware is the echo of what has passed and of what was loved, giving them a resonance such as a great cathedral gives to a choir, so that they would be the poorer without it.
No one lives at the Barrier of Fuha;
The wooden penthouse is fallen away;
All that remains
Is the autumn wind.
The evening haze;
Thinking of past things,
How far-off they are!
Aware is the moment of crisis between seeing the transience of the world with sorrow and regret, and seeing it as the very form of the Great Void.
The stream hides itself
In the grasses
Of departing autumn.
Leaves falling,
Lie on one another;
The rain beats on the rain.
That moment of transition is just about to "cross over" in the haiku written by Issa upon the death of his child:
This dewdrop world-
It may be a dewdrop,
And yet-and yet-
Since yugen signifies a kind of mystery, it is the most baffling of all to describe, and the poems must speak for themselves.
The sea darkens;
The voices of the wild ducks
Are faintly white.
The skylark:
Its voice alone fell,
Leaving nothing behind.
In the dense mist,
What is being shouted
Between hill and boat?
A trout leaps;
Clouds are moving
In the bed of the stream.
Or an example of yugen in the Zenrin poems:
Wind subsiding, the flowers still fall;
Bird crying, the mountain silence deepens.
Alan Watts - The Way of ZenThe wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection;
The water has no mind to receive their image.
PoemMany people choose a subject for their phd and then continue the same subject until they retire. I despise this approach. I have changed my subject five times before I got my first tenured position and that helped me to learn different subjects. When one dares to try, rewards are not guaranteed but at least it is an adventure.
Andre GeimI'm like a really dumb Ramanujan.
Danny WiseGordon, like Holmes, was a man of almost obsessional modesty who yet had a startlingly high opinion of himself.
H.R.F Keating : Sherlock Holmes, The man and his world. (historical fiction)[Lin Yifu] advised poor countries that if they want to get richer, they needed to delay political reform or fall victim to the chaos of post-Soviet Russia. He argued for the virtues of being free not from repression but "from the fear of poverty and hunger, of which I hold vivid childhood memories." When he wrote in his own name, not on behalf of the Bank, he was even more strident: he dismissed the "optimistic, and perhaps naive, argument put forward by some scholars that democracies... are more likely to undertake economic reforms." He quoted Deng Xiaoping, who once said, "The United States brags about it's political system, but the president says one thing during the election, something else when he takes office, something else at midterm, and something else when he leaves." [...]
[Wu Jinglian] "It's entirely obvious that the biggest problem China faces right now is corruption," he told me. "Corruption is the reason for the gap between rich and poor. Where did this corruption come from? From the fact that government continues to control too many resources."
In a furiuous stream of essays and books, Wu pointed to crony capitalism and the gap between rich and poor as evidence that China's economic model had run up against the limit of what was possible without the government's permitting greater political openness to mediate competing demands.[...]
[Liu Xiaobo] Liu had lived through the old rituals of dissent, the "bicycle-and-telephone era," as he called it, when intellectuals had to wait for a funeral or an anniversary in order to convene without arousing the government's suspicion of large groups.
age of ambitionPauli "was open to speculation about numerology and the supernatural, an interest cemented through his interactions with Carl Gustav Jung", writes Halpern. It’s a reminder that even extraordinarily rational intellect can come up short when confronted with the subjective depths of one’s own being.The finite-dimensional formulation of Hamiltonian systems of ordinary differential equations is well known, but in preparation for the more reent theory of Hamiltonian systems of evolution equations, we are required to take a slightly novel approach to the whole subject of Hamiltonian mechanics. Here we will de-emphasisze the use of canonical coordinates (the p's and q's of classical mechanics) and concentrate instead on the Poisson bracket as the cornerstone of the subject. The result is the more general concept of a Poisson structure, which is easily extended to include the infinite-dimensional theory of Hamiltonian systems of evolution equations. [...]
It has been said that it is far easier to abstract a general mathematical theory from a single well-chosen example than it is to apply an existing abstract theory to a specific example.
Applications of Lie groups to differential equations. Peter J. OlverLike the Holmes whom Watson had noted as lazing `for days on end' on the sofa, Gordon too could have spells of almost totally opting-out. In equatoria, when once there was acute danger of an attack on his camp and his deputy dared to ignore the hatchet placed as a `keep out' sign at his tent door, Gordon was found sitting with in front of him an open Bible and an equally open bottle of brandy and would say nothing more than `You are commander of the camp.'
If Gordon from time to time succumbed to the brandy bottle, Watson was to find before he had been long acquainted with Holmes that his paragon was all to apt, in moments of boredom, to resort to hypodermic injections of cocaine or morphine. [...]
Both men hated dining out. 'Met think giving dinners is conferring a favour on you,' snarled Gordon. 'Why not give dinners to those who need them?' And Holmes, almost as abrasive, spoke of 'those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.'
H.R.F Keating [Comment: there are some interesting similarities between Amos Tvasrki and the fictional characters S. Holmes + General 'Chinese' Gordon -Especially the element of gratiously and completely dis-regarding certain social pressures]Tang’s humble roots and old-fashioned values impressed her. “Most of my generation has a smooth, happy life, including me,” she said. “I feel like our character lacks something. For example, love for the country or the perseverance you get from overcoming hardship. Those virtues—I don’t see them in myself and many people my age.” Of Tang Jie, she said, “From that kind of background, with nobody educated in his family, nobody helping him with his schoolwork, with great family pressure, it’s not easy for him to get where he is today.” [...]
Tang told me, “The fact is we are very Westernized. Now we started reading ancient Chinese books and we rediscovered the ancient China.” The young neoconservatives in Shanghai invited Harvey Mansfield to dinner when he passed through Shanghai. They “are acutely aware that their country, whose resurgence they feel and admire, has no principle to guide it,” Mansfield wrote in an e-mail to me after his visit. “Some of them see … that liberalism in the West has lost its belief in itself, and they turn to Leo Strauss for conservatism that is based on principle, on ‘natural right.’ This conservatism is distinct from a status-quo conservatism, because they are not satisfied with a country that has only a status quo and not a principle.” [..]
The overseas Chinese students’ bulletin board had been alive all afternoon with discussions of the anniversary. Liu mentioned the famous photograph of an unknown man standing in front of a tank—the most provocative image in modern Chinese history.
“We really acknowledge him. We really think he was brave,” Liu told me. But of that generation, he said, “They fought for China, to make the country better. And there were some faults of the government. But finally, we must admit that the Chinese government had to use any way it could to put down that event.” [...]
Age of AmbitionMagnify emotion while undermining critical thought
good PR can create a "group mind" and "manufacture consent" for the ruling elite
Walter Lippmann
If the mass will be free of chains of iron, it must accept chains of silver
Harold LasswellGone are the days - I thought - when you were learning to fly your little propeller plane, which you could almost steer with the weight of your body, without losing sight of your friends on the ground. From now on, you will be up in the blue empty sky where there is nothing to see and to trust but instruments, instruments that will tell you where you are and where you are going, even though all around be night and mist. And you'd better learn to make the best possible use of those instruments, for your survival depends on it. The mathematical formalism of wave functions and operators will keep you afloat above a microscopic world that is too small to see, but not to imagine.
Giovanni VignaleAlways, my dear Sir, I wish I could see the things as they are before they show themselves to me. They must be so beautiful and calm.
Fanz kafka, Conversations with the supplicant**Simplicio** The notion of physical realist is a "category" or a schema of thought which we need in order to render intelligible the totality of the content of consciousness. We cannot give a definition of "reality" without getting involved in circularity, but there is no obstacle to using such a concept as a heuristic principle, justified entirely by its usefulness.
[...]
**Sagredo** Now I understand why Newton needed a God to put his planets in motion. It is evident that his laws of motion could not give him any other solutions for the planetary obits which are not observed. There is nothing in these laws which would require these particular solutions with the exact number and size of planets as they are observed. And is it not natural to assume that the particular arragement of the planets with nearly circular orbits, all in the same plane and with the same direction of motion, shows the hand of the original designer?
**Salviati** Yes, that was Newton's quest. And I believe he was deeply aware that every real event is something single and unique, which in a strict sense never happens again. Some of his followers may have forgotten that important point. It is the very essence of a physical law that it refers to reproducible physical situations and therefore, strictly speaking, never to an individual even, or rather to individual events only insofar as they are members of an ensemble of similar events.
Jauch - Are Quanta Real - a Galilean DialogueThe nice thing about things that are urgent, is that if you wait long enough they aren't urgent anymore. [...] I would say to Amos I have to do this or I have to do that, And he would say 'No. You don't.' And I thought; Lucky man!
There was this beautiful simplicity to Amos: His likes and dislikes could be inferred directly and accurately and at all times from his actions.[...]
He'd walk into a room and decide he didn't want anything to do with it and he would fade into the background and just vanish, it was like a superpower. And it was absolutely an abnegation of social responsibility. He didn't accept social responsibility - and so graciously, so elegantly, didn't accept it.[...]
Shore asked him how he had become a psychologist. "It's hard to know how people select a course in life," Amos said. "The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What *kind* of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits."
(about) Amos TvarskyWhen someone says something, don't ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.
Danny KhanemanI wonder whether fractal images are not touching the very structure of our brains. Is there a clue in the infinitely regressing character of such images that illuminates our perception of art? Could it be that a fractal image is of such extraordinary richness, that it is bound to resonate with our neuronal circuits and stimulate the pleasure I infer we all feel?
P. W. AtkinsIn any field find the strangest thing and then explore it.
J. A. WheelerIt would be easy to read about the studies on entity vs. incremental theories of intelligence and come to the conclusion that a child should never win or lose. I don't believe this is the case. If that child discovers any ambition to pursue excellence in a given field later in life, he or she may lack the toughness to handle inevitable obstacles. While a fixation on results is certainly unhealthy , short-term goals can be useful developmental tools if they are balanced within a nurturing long-term philosophy. Too much sheltering from results can be stunting. The road to success is not easy or else everyone would be the greatest at what they do - we need to be psychologically prepared to face the unavoidable challenges along our way, and when it comes down to it, the only way to learn how to swim is by getting in the water.
Josh WaitzkinThe west wind whispered,
And touched the eyelids of spring :
Her eyes, Primroses.
R. M. HansardThis book is of great interest for the emergin field known as the "Geometric Science of Information", in which the generalization of the Fisher metric is at the heart of the extension of classical tools of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to deal with more abstract objects living in homogeneous manifolds, gorups and structured matrices. Future of Information Geometry and Artificial Intelligence should be based on the pillars deveoloped in Koszul's book. The "Geometric Science of Information" community (GSI, www.gsi2017.org) has lost a mathematician of great value [Koszul], who enlightened his views by the depth of his thoughts.
Frederic Barbaresco in Introduction to Symplectic Geometry Springer (2019)The great Tao flows, such as it may left and right.
Thirty spokes unite in one nave; but it is on the empty space for the axle, that the use of the wheel depends.
Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness, that thir use depends.
The door and windows are cut out from the walls to form an apartment; but it is on the empty space within, that it's use depends.
Therefore, what has a positive existence serves for profitable adaptation, and what has not that for actual usefulness.
Tao Te ChingAct by means of inaction;
Deal with matters by means of not being meddlesome;
The big stems from the small;
The many is based on the few.
To overcome the difficult should begin with the easy;
To accomplish what is big should begin with the small.
The difficult things in the world must originate in the easy;
The big things in the world must take root in the small.
That is why the sage can accomplish what is great
by never attempting to be great.
Tao Te ChingGreat floods have flown from simple sources.
Shakespear (came across it in DE's textbook)Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.
VoltaireRemember, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon.
Don' Letch POOHA!
Base!
Stack and armbar, posture a choke.
Friend Stephen!
Always unique, toally intersting, sometimes mysterious.
The word LOOSER is painted in big red letters on the cieling. [paraphrasing only]
Hilton'Simple' is defined from a technical standpoint, not a usability standpoint. It is better to be technically elegant with a higher learning curve, than to be easy to use and technically inferior.
Aaron GriffinEntia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
"Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily"
Occam's RazorThe student's biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and- whip grading, a mule mentality which said, "If you don't whip me, I won't work.'' He didn't get whipped. He didn't work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him. This is a tragedy, however, only if you presume that the cart of civilization, "the system,'' is pulled by mules. This is a common, vocational, "location'' point of view, but it's not the Church attitude. The Church attitude is that civilization, or "the system'' or "society'' or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men. The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man. The hypothetical student, still a mule, would drift around for a while. He would get another kind of education quite as valuable as the one he'd abandoned, in what used to be called the "school of hard knocks.'' Instead of wasting money and time as a high-status mule, he would now have to get a job as a low-status mule, maybe as a mechanic. Actually his real status would go up. He would be making a contribution for a change. Maybe that's what he would do for the rest of his life. Maybe he'd found his level. But don't count on it. In time…six months; five years, perhaps…a change could easily begin to take place. He would become less and less satisfied with a kind of dumb, day-to-day shopwork. His creative intelligence, stifled by too much theory and too many grades in college, would now become reawakened by the boredom of the shop. Thousands of hours of frustrating mechanical problems would have made him more interested in machine design. He would like to design machinery himself. He'd think he could do a better job. He would try modifying a few engines, meet with success, look for more success, but feel blocked because he didn't have the theoretical information. He would discover that when before he felt stupid because of his lack of interest in theoretical information, he'd now find a brand of theoretical information which he'd have a lot of respect for, namely, mechanical engineering.
Robert Piercig : Zen and the Art of Motorcycle MaintnanceNo continuum in mathematics and therefore no continuum in physics. A half-century of development in the sphere of mathematical logic has made it clear that there is no evidence supporting the belief in the existential character of the number continuum. "Belief in this transcendental world," Hermann Weyl tells us, "taxes the strength of our faith hardly less than the doctrines of the early Fathers of the Church or of the scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages". This lesson out of mathematics applies with equal strength to physics. "Just as the introduction of the irrational numbers... is a convenient myth [which] simplifies the laws of arithmetic... so physical objects," William Van Orman Quine tells us "are postulated entities which round out and simplify level answer."[...]
Fourth and last no: No space, no time. Heaven did not hand down the word "time". Man invented it, perhaps positing hopefully as he did that "Time is Nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once". If there are problems with the concept of time, they are of our own creation! As Leibniz tells us, "... time and space are not things, but orders of things...;" or as Einstein put it, "Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live."
What are we to say about the weld of space and time into spacetime which Einstein gave us in his 1915 and still standard classical geometrodynamics? On this geometry quantum theory, we know, imposes fluctuations. Moreover, the predicted fluctuations grow so great at distances of the order of the Planck length that in that domain they put into question the connectivity of space and deprive the very concepts of "before" and "after" of all meaning. This circumstance reminds us anew that no account of existence can ever hope to rate as fundamental which does not translate all of continuum physics into the language of bits. We will not feed time into any deep-reaching account of existence. We must derive time - and time only in the continuum idealization - out of it. Likewise with space.[...]
Deplore? No, celebrate the absence of a clear definition of the term "bit" as elementary unit in the establishment of meaning. We reject "that view of science which used to say, 'Define your terms before you proceed.' The truly creative nature of any forward step in human knowledge," we know, "is such that theory, concept, law and method of measurement - forever inseparable - are born into the world in union." If and when we learn how to combine bits in fantastically large numbers to obtain what we call existence, we will know better what we mean both by bit and by existence.
A single question animates this report: Can we ever expect to understand existence? Clues we have, and work to do, to make headway on the issue. Surely someday, we can believe, we will grasp the central idea of it all as so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that we will all say to each other, "Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind so long!"
Wheeler in Information, Physics, Quantum: The search for linksHe who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
NietzscheIf you haven't found something strange during the day it hasn't been much of a day
WheelerWe who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate. [...]
Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevski said once, "There is only on thing that I drea: not to be worthy of my sufferings." These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whos suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful.[...]
We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the resposibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfil the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is imporssible to define the meaning of life in a general way.[...]
Sunday neurosis: that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes mansifest. [...] Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by *answering for* his own life;[...]
Categorical imperative of logotherapy : Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now![...] Self actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence. Thus far we have shown that the meaning of life always changes, but that it never ceases to be. According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. [...] Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized.
Viktor Fankle : Man's Search for MeaningI love codeing but sometimes I just wanna shoot myself!
- MarleyI will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
W.B. YeatsThe worldly hope men set their hearts upon
Turns ashes - or it prospers ; and anon,
Like snow upon the desert's dusty face
Lighting a little hour or two - is gone.
Rubaiyat of Omar KhayyamHe was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too. He regarded himself as the fixed entity, not the pilgrimage or the mountain, and thus wasn't ready for it. He spectulated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the emountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensly that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take.
To the untrain eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference!
Robert Piercig : Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintnance
