I gave ten years
to sharpening the axe
and weaving the noose
I learned to wait with patience
while the cogs of life
spun to my desired settings
You must treat the mind
as a body to be cultured
before climbing into space
the delicate coordination
of extraordinary
and mundane
is the key
to opening
life as heaven
=========================
I don’t write much about meditation. I should. It’s foundational. For people who think for a living it’s probably the single greatest investment that can be made in career, in productivity, in serenity, and most especially, in effectiveness.
Founder of the Hare Krishnas - surprisingly clear and lucid and direct. No mention (so far) of chanting Gournanga and being Happy. I’d never seen any of his material directly, only filtered by the organization, and he’s more impressive than they make him look.
I finally picked up a field recorder: the Zoom H2.
Unexpected bonuses
* extremely aggressive automatic gain control on “voice mode”
* 24/96 recording
* incredibly light but not chintzy
* features like automatic gain control work even when it’s in USB mic mode - ideal for skype etc.
quirks
* UI is a bit fiddley, but not horrific
* Showed up as a USB audio device fine the first time, then not again. Probably means I need to reboot.
Overall… I’d rather have bought it at American than european prices, and it’s a good enough device to open up a good deal of new ground. Good kit.
Faster computers do not make writing programs easier, any more than printing presses made it easier to write poetry.
Vinay Gupta
I’ve been trying to find a way of saying that for a while. Now, of course, conversely
Computers which are too slow or too small for the problem at hand make programming harder because you must write code to solve the problem and make your computers act as if they are faster and bigger than they really are. These are two separate problems, and the second one is often very hard indeed.
What happened is that people saw faster computers make programming easier in the early days because it was simply dealing with the second problem - machines that were too slow and too small.
The fascinating problem is this: can you turn excess computing power into more code that solves the problem?
Answer? NO!
That’s AI. Expecting faster computers to make programs easier to write is AI-complete. There might be a few “hacks” which are equivalent to teaching computers to play chess. For example, Python is fairly widely acknowledged to make many programmers feel far, far more productive. And it is pretty slow. So a problem solved in Python might be solved a little more easily than solving it in assembler, but the improvement is perhaps log(n) of the difference in speed between the computer which can solve the problem in assembler, and the computer which can solve it in Python.
Maybe every 10x improvement in computing power doubles the speed with which programs can be written.
But the reason for that is that, at the end of the day, we’re sending a computer to do a person’s job. The conversion of computer cycles into intelligence is very, very inefficient in deeply non-linear ways as we know from fields like chess and, say, natural language processing in areas like machine translation.
What’s the answer? Frankly, almost no work has been done on programming as a human activity. If we trained programmers the same way we trained athletes - monitored performance, charted data across large groups, experimented with training regimes… if we had coaches who’s job it was to get the most out of teams - not managers but honest-to-god coaches…
A good programmer can make a company tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over a career. The investment of companies in optimizing the performance of their programmers seldom goes further than a decent office environment. We’ve been barking up the wrong tree for a long time, trying to make computers into better programmers, rather than focussing all that research into how to make programmers better at programming.
Among Collins’s most controversial beliefs is that of “theistic evolution”, which claims natural selection is the tool that God chose to create man. In his version of the theory, he argues that man will not evolve further.
“I see God’s hand at work through the mechanism of evolution. If God chose to create human beings in his image and decided that the mechanism of evolution was an elegant way to accomplish that goal, who are we to say that is not the way,” he says.
“Scientifically, the forces of evolution by natural selection have been profoundly affected for humankind by the changes in culture and environment and the expansion of the human species to 6 billion members. So what you see is pretty much what you get.”
Emphasis added. What a foolish, petty, human-centric view of the divine this man has. Does he really think that these petty, fleeting, passing bodies and their limited, erratic minds are the end of the line for evolution?
Sexual selection is a massive continuing evolutionary pressure in the west (hello, skinny girls) never mind the simple fact that people who choose to have many children will assuredly outcompete those who choose to have few (one could say this is a genetic bias for those who like having a lot of kids.)
I’m all for concepts like “evolution is how god choose to create people” - as a Hindu, I’m moderately sure, on the preponderance of evidence, not all of which fits into lab settings, that there is Something Out There. But I am also sure that this Something Out There is the god of the Dolphins and the Whales and the Ants as much as it is the god of the hairless monkeys, and the androcentrism of that particular hairless monkey’s approach to god is… well… kind of disgusting.
We are not the end of the line, the pinnacle of anything. We’re a particular form that life currently takes, and there was a before, and very likely there will be an after. To suggest that humans are the crown of creation is to make god in our own flawed image, rather than to accept our actual role in the scheme of things: a reflective ape that gazes on the world with a glimmer of hope and understanding, and should know, from one glance up at the night sky, that the journey of life is scarcely even begun.
