Primes or Squares?

Proximity

How self indulgent can a confessed hedonist be?

Layered posts; hacking public discourse for privacy...

So, I've not worked on my LifeMap. Life interfered. Would be nice if life allowed sufficient fallow periods to recover from doozies - like crop rotation, but for the amydala

Happy Valentine's to everyone :-)!

Exceptions

"it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair"

"Heav’n... the Vision of fulfil’d desire." —Omar Khayyám #sixwords

Falak al aflak. Here and There. #sixwords

Do demons dance delightfully down Devaloka #sixwords

I seem gifted at separating jumping off a cliff with the Splat! at the end.... Guess I always have been

Reading #sixwords

Maladaptive coping mechanisms

To an autonomic neurochemical calculus

I want to feel... I want you to know that I feel... I want to feel... I know that I should feel....

http://ping.fm/Szubk

Good night!

I didn't begin reading seriously and continually until I was 12. & then I discovered archetypes, models of survival and I have since collected and counted and shined them repeatedly. Iown a great many books, more than half of which I've not read. I am not entirely sure I intend reading them, but I am sure that I do not intend not reading them.

They are promises of idyll; and such promises are always welcome on rainy days :-)!

The subject for this week's series of discussions is cancer

A new continuum Fantasy - Wish - Hope - Expectation - Entitlement

See. Assess. Communicate.

Morality as evolutionary outcome?

How primitive are we really?

Reminded again tonight of personal vs private

Was discussing the sensecam this weekend and use cases seemed to be difficult to conceive. Sin-eaters anyone?

A little public service http://ping.fm/dxqXh

Why limit yourself to a single interface to reality?

In defence of mediocrity: life is hard. I will always argue for moving the mean.

Exceptional talent extends the boundaries of impossible.

http://ping.fm/gU6W0

Discussion last night on the transferability of experience; vicarious living notwithstanding :-)

http://ping.fm/TQwbz

It seems I am recently much given to the apperceptionof soul...

So, here is a task: to delineate the shape of a soul

"until out of merely not nothing comes
only one snowflake(and we speak our names "

"with my childhood's faith"

"We are not normal, but we are sane."

We have this one life to live and if we can inhabit its living we can finish happily used up; this bonfire should leave no ash

"all our lives, life happens: both the cork and the ocean ride the waves"
myself

Challenge is another word for frustration

If in every negotiation, the relationship is the argument, why do we not have better developed relationship semiotics

I have just realised that when children's motives do not make sense, I consciously try to model their thinking: I have my own experiences and a great deal of developmental psychology to buttress my experiments.

When adults seem particularly opaque or obtuse or petrified I make no similar attempt to model. I find adult illogic to be frictionless and impenetrable: impossible to model. Perhaps I do them a disservice?

"what the eye sees better the heart feels more deeply"
Kegan

Some losses are insupportable, they break us. And sometimes we are broken irreparably. If we grieve properly we may continue to function; we adapt, but the place from which we move is foreign soil, forever Other.

What essentially constitutes friendship?

A will to fairness as evidence of an innate moral sense?

Authenticity

I'm all for vicarious living - experience makes one old!

"the delight of the learned, the solace of the indolent, and the refuge of the uninformed"

A masterpiece is an expressed local maximum

...in favour of pageantry!

You feel tired you sleep right? What happens when fatigue and sleep are physiologically uncoupled?

http://ping.fm/qfyQ2

What would you do if you had access to your every thought at any time?

If emotions are outputs, the results of numerous calculations, how can we plan for future emotional states?

Happiness is a variegated composite. Doing A, achieving B, aspiring to C, cannot by definition produce and maintain happiness.

FB as an interface for social computing; preference is an algorithm

Wishing you all a Happy, Prosperous & Productive New Year!

http://ping.fm/URqqi

What is the impetus to sympathy?

http://ping.fm/yAQNL

Art or Reality? Reality is inconvenient & quite often ugly....

I am glad that Christmas is over & really looking forward to my 3 weeks of sun!

Very Merry Christmas!

Fortune cookie: I just realised that if a personality could be a Möbius strip I would be it; there! Now I am fully explained if explicable :-)

"The book belonged to my father, a scientist, and was a favorite of his; in fact he had a large appetite for fantasy. I have wondered if there isn't some real connection between a certain kind of scientific-mindedness (the explorative, synthesizing kind) and fantasy-mindedness. Perhaps 'science fiction' really isn't such a bad name for our genre after all. Those who dislike fantasy are very often equally bored or repelled by science. They don't like either hobbits, or quasars; they don't feel at home with them; they don't want complexities, remoteness. If there is any such connection, I'll bet that it is basically an aesthetic one."

Le Guin

What constraint continually mires a discussion of the general in particulars?

DULCE ET DECORUM EST(1)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares(2) we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest(3) began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots(4)
Of tired, outstripped(5) Five-Nines(6) that dropped behind.
Gas!(7) Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets(8) just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime(9) . . .
Dim, through the misty panes(10) and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering,(11) choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud(12)
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest(13)
To children ardent(14) for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.(15)

Wilfred Owen
8 October 1917 - March, 1918

Lucid intoxication

Holographic. Monistic. Atomistic.... Confused?

Should the dying be encouraged to die faster?

http://ping.fm/o8seJ

http://ping.fm/EdM4r

http://ping.fm/KRKX8

A plug!
http://ping.fm/KzVLC

"the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning"

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veil'd the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree.

William Blake
Songs of Experience

May you be blessed and abide in a state of Grace;
May The Ineffable preserve your health of body and of mind,
and keep you firmly all the days of your life,
lending you strength in trial and joy otherwise.

Some prose barely misses being poetry; that is an underhanded cruelty....

The first question that has to be asked in an emergency is, "Is there time to think?"

Reality has no versioning

What happens to reality when the map becomes richer than the territory?

Flood. Assimilate. Abstract. Refine. Reiterate.

RP The Future of Medicine

It is not new technologies that we have to fear, but old passions. The ban on human cloning will be lifted at some time with both good and bad consequences most of which are currently unforeseeable.

 

The future is unpredictable and will become more so. New technologies will continue to proliferate and the average standard of living will continue to rise. Life will become materially easier and psychosocially more stressful. We remain constrained by a very slowly evolving biology.

 

Welcome to the Future of Medicine.

RP I am Sorry

I am sorry.

 

I am sorry that you do not have the life that you dreamed of having. I am sorry that you do not have the work you thought you were made for or the partner you believe you deserve. I am sorry that you were mistaken in the options you thought you had.

 

I am sorry.

 

I was late learning that saying those three words is not the same as saying that it is my fault. It is my expression of my feeling for you and not an attribution of blame, an acknowledgement of responsibility. Women seem to learn this at an early age. Men often do not.

 

Most people feel entitled to an apology for numerous unnamed injustices and many walk around with an unacknowledged anger. No-one's life is perfect and no-one cares!

 

Csikszentmihalyi has an agreeable prescription: forget happiness as a goal, it is a by-product: seek challenge. Goethe offers encouragement too, "Whatever you believe you can do, or dream you can…."

 

RP Risk Neutral

"If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;"

                                         

Rudyard Kipling

 

I cannot do that.

 

I am unusually rational and by that I mean that I tend not to make decisions on the basis of my feelings. I try to be risk neutral which is not always easy and even so, I know I cannot do that: risk everything and bear the loss in silence.

 

Life is about risking loss. We love despite the risk. We marry and have children despite the risks. We may be blind to the risks; we still take them.

 

I cannot do that, but I do consider it an ideal to strive for.

Zemanta helped me add links & pictures to this email. It can do it for you too.

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”

Henry David Thoreau

A basic emotion (e.g., interest, joy, sadness, and anger) is a set ofneural, bodily/expressive, and feeling/motivational componentsgenerated rapidly, automatically, and nonconsciously when anecologically meaningful stimulus is sensed or perceived (Izard,2007).

http://ping.fm/XU7eX

Queueing theory, stochastic limerence, imaginary numbers and a girl called Cindy...

"It is discomfiting to accept that health care in the emergency department (ED) is basically dangerous, kept from disaster only by the continuous interventions and adjustments of the people working in it."

http://ping.fm/PhRg5

"comiogenic error"

http://ping.fm/b2MQl

AMA & Social media

"The chief result of all this more modern view is the gradually growing conviction that mental life is primarily teleological; that is to say, that our various ways of feeling and thinking have grown to be what they are because of their utility in shaping our reactions on the outer world"

http://ping.fm/5cAmc

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now".

"No! Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try."

Yoda

Hospital based multi-specialty practice as federated. What are the rules of engagement?

"In times of peace, we should learn ourselves, and teach others, that which, in troublous times, both they and we must practise"

We are arrested in conviction; deafened with acclaim and facile with facade. Torment knows no preparation and Ecstacy burns it all away.

Good night! Good morn! Good day! Scripted so; and such! Welcome! [Got any LSD?]

The Proper Study of Mankind
From Alexander Pope. An Essay on Man. As reproduced in Poetical Works, ed. H. F. Cary (London: Routledge, 1870), 225-226.
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of Truth, in endless error hurl'd:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

The evidence is conclusive: homo sapiens sapiens is not designed for thinking; reason is grafted and we named ourselves more in hope than description

Fickle fortune, inconstant Hynos, remitting Morpheus!

Are you not glad there is no monopoly on idiocy? I am.

Why does an assessment of the utility of knowledge exclude superordinate changes of perspective? There are no immutable facts; theories (sic) are just that; opinions are really statements of preference. Wisdom is superordinate.

Here's to the celebration of apparently useless knowledge: may the worlds we live in intersect....