Daily_Scratchpad

The aim here is to write down stuff everyday

03/01/22 13:11:13

I wonder do we understand ourselves much better in the modern age. It’s slightly rhetoric because of course we do its just the idea that we still have a long way to go it daunting. It seems like we’re not making progress but maybe this progress is different from technological progress. Could it be due to the non deterministic nature of humans, or just that we’re a lot more complex that technological advancements. We put a man on the moon but that seems to pale in comparison to understanding ourselves. This is similar to Asimov in foundation. The real advancement will be understanding ourselves.

Where are the modern Bach’s or Von Neumann’s? Do we on average not have the same interaction with life that used to be? Maybe they’re there but culture disincentives them, not even in bad ways. Like a modern Bach just joining a startup or becoming a financial analyst. It seems like this is the more plausible answer. From here

I think that maybe energy innovation isn’t it. I dont think I like the actually process. Partly because I dont know it. There must be something there though. Theres just something about it that just seems monotonous. I suppose research is this way sometimes. I’d like to do something I’m curious about though if I’m going to go down that route.

Is there a disconnection from each other that comes into play here. Have we become out of touch with our inner nature too much, the need for touch, to be consoled, to have support from a community. This is mainly coming from a tweet I saw yesterday. It makes me think also about the constant state of high I try to live in. Specifically, Dopamine its like the thought of quiet in ones mind should be avoided at all costs. This is normal I think, not some deep seethed problem with me. It’s an animal type nature. I just wonder if having to deal with that quiet would be beneficial for us sometimes. That when we see something pleasurable or interact with something pleasurable we don’t crave more all the time, of course its normal too but the self-imposed restrictions, is that something good?

What if I grow to miss tech. Theres something there that I love, that I’m good at. I’m almost hoping something is there with Web 3.0. Even if I could just do something like astrophysics and help out somehow on the side. The way I can be most useful is using my current abilities. I would like to try something ambitious though, or at least interesting that I could take ownership of in some way. I should spend time trying to understand Web 3.0. I find I lack a real conceptual understanding of it when trying to explain it. It seems that I kind of just want to feel part of something. Maybe I need to fell wanted or something.

Last night, my brain was on fire. I think its the change of sleep schedule. Anyways, I though about if I had someone, like a partner who I could really be vulnerable with, what would I say. I think in my teenage years and early twenties I felt that I was kind of repulsive, irredeemable, that I have these sinful thoughts or something. It wasn’t only porn and that it was also my looks, I felt that there was no point in competing, that I must try some other way and that eventually it would come. It reminded me of the Dostoevsky quote

to angels - vision of God’s throne to insects - sensual lust

I tried reading around this passage, couldn’t really make heads or tails of it apart from maybe the idea that God is cruel for giving us a vision a beauty “it is a terrible thing because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed” it’s this ideal were always falling short of. It’s like, sometimes when you see a beautiful woman (or person) and what some sort of interaction with it, it pains your chest to know someone can be so beautiful. There some sort of connection with it you search for, I think a normal reaction might be to be with that person but sometimes your own lack of beauty (as framed by oneself) corrupts this and ruins it.

Dickens, in ‘Great Expectations’ writes how Pip becomes ashamed of who is based on reproach or scorn from new people he’s met, particularly a beautiful girl. I couldn’t help but try and find myself in it, as I usually do. Theres this standard that I had of myself when I was young, I had never encountered scorn really, dissatisfaction from someone I liked that would make me feel ashamed, probably until girls came into the picture. Then, I felt inadequate. I felt ashamed of my parents for giving me these hideous features, ashamed of my endowment in life because socially I was not thriving or did not have the adoration of those I liked. This could just be a convenient ‘semi’ explanation but something about it rings true.

Should I go to the US? Maybe waiting until April makes sense, to really work hard for the next 3 months. I’d only be going for the Jiu-Jitsu at the moment, not the worst reason but not exactly the best.

I’ve been trying to understand conjunctive probabilities. I see that the new sample space for two events is no a combination of events so the sample space increases by a multiplication between the two initial sample spaces. I’m just not too sure how multiplication of event probabilities scales up the uncertainty proportionally.

04/01/22 12:06:49

Maybe I’m starting to realise that there are a lot of people out there trying to help. Or more so, that a large majority of paths I could go down in theory could help and don’t explicitly harm. Helping then becomes a part time thing but I can’t say that I would ever want it to be full time.

I’ve thought about reading Rilke. Similar to Denial of Death, I feel like it’s kind of calling out to me. I heard someone talk about his idea that people can have a destiny but not fulfil it. Not for any particular reason, just because thats where life lead them. Even if the path was presented to them they might not necessarily take it. I feel like this a bit with astrophysics.

Web 3.0 might change the world but it will take a lot of work. It’s kind of spurs open protocol innovation. People will do a lot more things when money is involved, even if its not really what I want. Crypto is not really accessible either.

I got foot cream, we’ll see how that goes.

Blockchains are state machines?

I started reading a wait but why post about choosing career. I thought Id start exploring that here. https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html

When I look at a career path, what affects my decision?

• I want it to be meaningful?
  • What does this mean, I want to derive meaning from it everyday in the sense that I can look at what I’m doing, even if its monotonous and say, this is working towards a grander, important goal
  • What is that goal? That I’m helping people, that it’s something bigger than myself, thats it’s something that’s good for me.
• I want to be useful
  • I think in some sense I aim to please, I want to be useful, to help and in some sense gain appreciation. Maybe like a dog gets a pat on the head for returning the tennis ball
• I want to find someone
  • I figure that if I pursue what I want to do I will find someone who is like me and who would love me. It hard to see how I might discover someone like this in my social life at the moment, so I see looking at career as an opportunity for something like this.
• Why don’t I want to do what I love or am curious about?
  • The first thing that pops up is why I don’t just pursue something like astrophysics for the next 5 years. Mainly, socially, its not great, things I’ve heard are that there’s no jobs, the only way to have an impact is if you’re smart, how do I explain it to people, In some sense It seems kind of useless. I don’t gain much from it socially and practically (in the financial, way of life sense).
  • This fits a narrative too that I want myself to fill in some sense, that I started learning about Physics at 14 and was considered no good, that I feel theres something there. That I fell awe for the night sky and inspired by the likes of Carl Sagan
  • What else am I curious about?
• Energy Innovation
  • I think what put me down this path was Vaclav Smil. There was some sense that just knowing what the problem was would be half the solution
  • The actual solution involves combined effort and meticulous work. I’m not content with this, it doesn’t pique my curiosity nor was it as all guns blazing as I had hoped.
• What are the main branches of my ‘yearning’ octopus?
  • Personal
    • I have lofty ambitions of who I am I think, beneath it all. I have the kind of intellectual superiority that I’m smarter, meant for something. Once again, this kind of narrative about who I am and should be.
      • It’s like an obligation.
      • Theres an obligation to that life is for living, like the pale blue dot, this obligation I want to fulfill. It comes from the likes of Shane and looking at interstellar, that the universe is marvelous, I want to appreciate it and interact with it even though most of the time I dont feel like it. It’s this reverence that I want to latch on to. It helps me put the faults I feel I have in perspective and makes me kinder to myself, that I’m really not all that bad.
    • I want to go for it too. To just try and do something risky in life and work hard and fail and meet great people and get back up etc.
    • A lot of the study I do I think is for this social reflection of myself. That I’m not socially gifted, I will be intellectually so (which I guess is a social thing).
    • There is a curiosity though, some of my happiest moments are thinking about stuff, or understanding a new idea. Or not feeling so pathetic when I can appreciate the great history of ideas and the world.
      • In this sense, sometimes I like the discipline of it all, doing something day in day out like a river eroding a stone. It’s almost proving to myself I do it or maybe, more so, the expectation it will all pay off because if you told me it would be a certain way endlessly I think I’d sack it all off.
      • I think I’m happiest or content at times doing things that I couldn’t care if anyone ever new I did them
        • Like understanding an idea in a book
        • Theres some shame associated with this then sometimes, like it would be a waste of time if no one ever saw the work I put in or the interesting stuff I’ve read. I think I live in this expectation that all I do will someday be revealed and people will say ‘wow, wasn’t he marvelous’. I think I know that deep down this won’t happen
  • Moral
    • Theres so much suffering in the world and often times I feel like we pull the ladder up behind us. This branch of things is more of a frustration, like when you see someone doing something inefficiently and you want to just go in and fix it so you can get it off your mind. I feel that sometimes about a lot of the issues I come across. Why can’t we just be done with these issues so I can be content?
    • I want to grow as a person too. Through the fog of dopamine I do what to learn about the world, I do find things interesting, theres gravitation towards things apart form the social elements I’ve listed. Theres a part of me that would be quite content to sit and read if only the other tentacles would shut up.
    • I do want to help people though, I find that a lot of the time I’m not willing to get down and dirty to do it however.
  • Lifestyle, a family, an engagement with life. Where does this want come from. In some sense, I’m scared of all these aspects of ‘living’ of letting go. And because I’m scared of them, they feel important. I somewhat ashamed maybe of my singular enjoyment of life.
    • Do I really want to find someone? I think I do, someone who I could be totally myself with, selfishly I guess. Someone I could grow old with. I guess, someone outside my family who might actually love me, my flaws and all. That idea seems like it would fill this hole in myself, kind of selfish I suppose.
    • Theres a social want here too, that I can just make people more comfortable with me, that I can just fit in more. That I do normal things and am not boring.
  • Social
    • I want to signal that I’m thoughtful and smart, part of the reason I want to produce written content, one as artifacts of learning and also that secretly I hope someone will stumble upon it one day and like Pip in Great Expectations I will suddenly be propelled into the life of a great thinker who people listen to
    • but the sense that I’m behind socially where I should be that I’ve sacrificed some social elements to be where I am (even though I didn’t, at least not explicitly) pains me so much. That I can go back in the world like I am, that I’m stunted. Some grotesque malformed creature emerging from the basements with a nice mind, but totally fucked everywhere else, physically, socially, sexually, the whole lot. A large aspect of that is being a virgin. I guess not having a person ever touch you (and in turn being transformed in my head to: “No one has ever wanted to touch me”) can wear on you. Theres an intense shame I have for it. That I will be exposed eventually for this person I really am, a loser. Theres a fear there too, that its too late, that I don’t have the courage to solve it on my own, that I never will. Self pity then comes along with this, the only interaction of a serendipitous nature I have with women is through Tinder, and its hard to have luck on this, trying to pretend to be something I’m not. I’m trying to find someone who might not look at me as this hideous beast and Tinder (not that anyone has taken me up on any offer) seems like the last place you’d find that.
    • Sometimes it’s hard to take responsibility for some of the failings in life. Although this start synopsis is based on the idea of not meeting someone by 24 or ever having a girlfriend as being a massive failure of oneself. Theres definitely aspects that I’ve tried to work on and can make changes too, this one those is the hard to modify one, I suppose because it’s external too me.
    • If we leave out the whole ‘hoping to find true love’ part here. I don’t feel too much pressure socially, I think my detachment is a benefit in this sense. I find solace in those I admire and their view of the world.

This all doesn’t really seem like a career problem. I just want to be healthy and happy. I think I yearn for the day when I could just relax and just be considered normal by myself, and by social standards. This second may not be attainable unfortunately as there’s always someone who wont like you or find you disagreeable.

There is some sense in which I must accept and move on. Not necessarily repress, but just stop viewing myself as this grotesque creature, it just keeps re affirming itself. Even if my worst nightmares in this aspect come true (for instance, someone knowing I’m a virgin) it doesn’t help me to wallow in it. In order to grow I need to let it stop blocking me, I can pop in the back pack but to keep moving. For instance, in talking about my career above, I inevitably started talking about these inadequacy I feel about myself. This takes away somewhat from trying to figure out solution not reaffirming the ‘problem’. It’s fine balance I guess.

In some sense, letting go of dead weight. Sometimes I won’t let myself succeed.

05/01/22 15:02:28

I started looking into the history of chemistry today, attempting to understand combustion. I get the feeling that my questions about it are slightly recursive. When I’m wondering how we know what we’re building our current (scientific) information on top of its using the same method were concerned with exploring. Experiment (the real world) is also always the burden of proof. It’s still interesting to explore some of the history of at least one phenomena.

I’ve been trying to read the Faraday lectures on how a candle works. I just can’t get into it. Even the associated videos. I want to have a tangible sense of how we define these invisible things, like chemicals, elements and atoms. The explanation makes up the description of them. For instance, a way of describing Oxygen might be that ‘thing’ that is removed from air when we burn a candle, how might this be test though. I know the other way, from weighing the burning of metal that oxidises before and after (has more weight). Weight here is the measurement.

Reading the Tim Urban article today, I felt reassurance from the logic of not actually being able to know who’ll you be. To not try and predict this. He contrasts the career path as a tunnel you choose vs a path with dots. When we look back it’s clear where all the dots were and whether they made sense. It’s impossible to predict where the dots go in the future though. Also careers are a lot more malleable than maybe contemporary culture would be prepared to admit.

Another useful tip is to try and look at the career (chess?) board looks like, what success in it looks like. If there is no real career chess board then trying to determine success in the ‘game’.

Urban talks about the tendency to define who you are by your work. Listening to the yearning octopus with all it’s wants (that don’t stop) is more of a valid metric, that you could be looking at this octopus and planning it’s yearning’s appropriately for what you want. As opposed to feeling dictated by what culture would dictate.

Do I want to study Physics?

• Self study for 2 years I think would put me in a good spot. It requires a lot of hard work. The benefits are large though even in a practical sense of discipline and problem solving. Do I want to study Economics?
• I think what I like about Economics is the insights it gives into the workings of the world. Knowing the problem doesn’t necessarily lead to the solution though.
• Understand the current career board
• What is my definition of success?
  • At the moment, I would like to be component to understand basic Physics fairly well. Not really for any use case.
• Maybe don’t think of my career as a tunnel
• Can I be satisfied with just jumping to the next dot in the path?
  • Of course
• Literally impossible to predict who I will be, should just keep my options open. In this sense, doing a wide array of things (which is what I actually kind of like doing) seems like a good idea.
• Releasing myself to do things like this might be kind of peripheral to my career (as in, wanting have enough freedom to do other things)

It is bloody freezing, I might not feel my toes til March

Getting things done really does rely on focus. Also my days at the moment are a bit lose so it can be difficult to jump into things to do if it’s not explicitly defined.

I listened to Dana Giaio on Tyler Cowen. Very knowledgeable guy and seems to just revel in knowing things that interest him. I watched his analysis of Yeats lake isle poem which was interesting just to explore the language and structure. It occurred to me that work isn’t so important. He worked at Jello for like 2 years and did some interesting things, I mean objectively Jello doesn’t matter but it’s kind of just a job and the interesting aspects aren’t necessarily what the company stands for. I don’t think you could say he hasn’t succeeded or anything. Just letting your curiosity run wild in any circumstance.

Physics was a struggle today. Maybe getting some grasp on energy and defining conservation of it. Defining the system is key it seems. Figuring out whats doing work with this ‘system’. If work is done by one component it must be stored somewhere in the system. In this sense, transferred to another ‘form’ of energy.

I teared up again looking at the handshake scene in for all mankind. It’s just this idea of looking past differences and seeing the humanity that unites us all.

06/01/22 16:07:16

I managed to complete study and reading earlier today. I have a feeling I could use another 3hrs at least more effectively.

I listened to a Huberman podcast about building habits. He talked about creating the environment and triggers for them etc. but also talked about dividing the day up into three phases which is kind of what I do. I try and get things like Physics and workouts done as early as I can because they’re kind of the hardest.

I think my general goal in life is just to be the best me. It encompasses a lot of things I guess. It’s very general but, I think its the case.

I’ve been struggling in Physics with understanding the conservation of Energy. It’s a whole different ball game applying concepts to actual problems. It’s a general confusion. Where to start. Where are the boundaries or connections between concepts. Energy is a mathematical construct for when we can’t really pin down all the finer details. It’s a general property of seemingly every interaction in the universe. Without it ‘invisible’ undetectable work could be done that might allow all sorts of things, such as using a small bit of energy to run something for an infinite amount of time (as we might be able to loop this invisible force)

On the career front I don’t see the need for major decisions. I’m kind of OK with how my life is going. Now it’s just a matter of finding work I suppose. Or maybe making use of the time between now and finding work.

I would like to meet more people who might be on the same ‘wavelength’ (whatever that may be). How do I do this?

Looking for strain not shying away from it Cal Newport

The craftsmen out there are not the guys checking their social media feeds every five minutes. They’re not looking for the easy win or the flow-state. They’re the guys that are out there three hours, pushing the skill. “This is hard but I’m going to master this new piece of software. I’m going to master this new mathematical framework.” That’s the mindset, the habit of the craftsman.

The CATU meeting was interesting. It’s kind of getting hands dirty which I think, because I don’t necessarily want to to do it. Is probably something I should do. I’m interested now to find out where the general opinions of CATU are developed are there experts or do we (the members) try and come up with it.

I’m not reading enough during the day. I mean critical reading the type that should provoke thoughts (I might write about here). I’m liking Great Expectations the last few days have been slow. I find Joe as always being a fountain of wisdom. The simple life Pip is leaving behind (and ashamed of). More just interesting thoughts, ‘fountain of wisdom’ is a bit dramatic.

I looked a bit into what an Astrophysicist does. Doesn’t really seem too interesting, as in, it doesn’t seem to add much to the awe factor I guess. I’m more convinced that having Physics self study for the next 2 years is the path forward for that. I feel myself kind of understanding that a job might not take as much time as I think it needs. I find myself not doing too much during the day. It will be interesting to see if I can change that and see how I feel about doing my own work whatever that is. Amateur astronomy could also be exciting. How do I get into this?

What are some ‘odd jobs’ I could pick up?

Maybe is something I can look into. Something thats under appreciated and useful.

It’s funny, not many thoughts really occurred to me today. I’m happy to have this freedom at the moment though mentally. Hopefully it lasts but just in terms of no responsibilities, I get to see all these options I’ve been looking at more as they are without the fog (for good and bad) of work or without things to kind of compare them to. I can look at the job I had without it being a possibility in the future. Kind of assess it realistically what was good and what was and about it. There’s also no reason to not do what I want to do. Particular in the sense of learning and writing. The whole goal really is to develop habits now so I can be effective at this. And also, maybe try and see how much work really took me away from them, if at all. So this general sense of being the best me kind of drives the daily decisions. And this is the best me in my own light, I think based on my own values (going back to the yearning octopus personal section). Next would be to figure out how to get involved in more social things. I’m working on it though, I think having an open mind is important.

Discovering the problem is only the first step in a chain of analysis. Say, like I was saying about Smil’s book where you have these incredible facts, or data really. Some of it is just interesting. Some of it is useful in analysing a problem. It can be kind of thrilling to know these things, for me, it feels like an ‘in’, I know something no one else knows but in a kind of insider trading, competitive secret way where I see it as gaining some advantage in helping the world solve some problem. This isn’t always the case, applying this knowledge is important. So if we know that China produced as much concrete in the first 16 years of the 21st century as the US did in all the 20th century, what do we do with this. Knowing it doesn’t solve the problem, it certainly frames it though. Under these stats though theres dynamics. You could state how much coal China use but the dynamics is the cheap production of goods that we demand. Once again, insider secret, we might know the dynamics, once again, doesn’t solve the problem that we’ve just found. These dynamics then come into play in any conceptual solution. Similar to a good hypothesis how do we string a new narrative that accounts for all these dynamics (some even, may be unknown). There may not be much in this ramble but it seems that constructing a solution involves knowing the dynamics yeah, but thats the easy part; sometimes I’ve found this part to be the end…but its not.

07/01/22 13:32:46

• Facing rejection, could be useful for me finding oppurtunties. Embracing it and asking why, don’t run.
• Kip thorne some had intuitive understanding, others found the aesthetic beauty in the maths
  • Kip thorne highlights the important of asking good questions. Are they answerable in a feasible amount of time. He says Hawking was one of the best Physicists of all time because he was able to ask these good questions. Also, is the question important (I guess in context)
  • He described someone who could look for aesthetic beauty in the mathematics which would resolve to real world solutions which is fascinating. Author of the book: Truth and beauty
  • It’s similar to Cixin Liu who described when a third ‘body’ is added how the equations and non-determinism of their interactions just explode mathematically. This is a way of seeing the world. A bit like reading Shakespeare vs watching a performance of it. The words are the same.
  • What camp do I lie in, do I require a bit of both or if I let go a bit of the intuition can I look at the maths in this aesthetic way. It’s probably something boring like a mix between the two but still, taping into this is interesting
• Just asymptotically approaching reality. If two mathematical tools or system model or predict reality then they are equal (until they dont). Trying to grasp some concepts may not be feasible at times. Grasping the descriptions of them might be more so. Similar to language. I can see a chair, but I can’t see an adjective. The language and it’s context is what gives the adjective meaning ( probably could come up with a better example). This is another case for maths being a language for the universe.
• Sometimes the mathematical representations and definitions in Physics are derived based on experiment not some rational intuitive thought. Now, you may see it intuitively, but it doesn’t seem you are wrong to just look at it numerically. After all, maths is the language of the universe the manipulation of universe and the dynamism of operations from function to function mimic that of nature. Whether our maths is universal or even if theres any language that completely describes things is unknown (I don’t know about Godels theorem) but it seems to work anyways.
• Going back to my struggle understanding the conservation of energy. It’s a mathematical tool to understanding the empirical observations. Here the tool is each ‘type’ of energy. It’s a balancing book that keeps us in check.
• Also conservative forces are path independent. Moving from a to b (say in the y axis) wont matter how windy for gravity as its a uniform field. It will matter for friction though as it resists according to the direction of motion.
• My great expectations similar to that of someone I look down on (instagram, snake oil) maybe…further thought
  • I think I had this notion like 2 years ago in the house in Phibsboro that I am just a soldier kind of. I couldn’t really resolve it too much then, as to being no more than an ant. I think now I kind of look at myself as the arbiter of myself. You view what you may or may not have done based on social things and that could be what made me feel small. Just looking at it as personal growth and determining what you feel is growth for you seems more empathetic at least.
  • In this respect of my ‘great’ ambitions I too was(am?) looking for the social norm of approval. It’s kind of like in the movie Birdman where at the end he flies above everyone and he’s saying, this is where you want to be right? And I guess in some sense it was, he was looking for adoration in the sense that he wanted people to view him as someone special, inevitably someone they could never be, better than them. I think subtly thats what my ego wants sometimes. I view myself in that sense because it satisfies the ego, and I’m ashamed to say some hidden want to be what I wasn’t in secondary school or in life maybe, noticed and social above people. Breaking it down it’s not really that great is it, to base your wants and dreams on something thats past. And also something that you’ve derived from the outside world. None the less it plays some role in my wants.
• The paralysing effect of lofty ambitions (when not smart, dunning kruger?)
  • So I was thinking about this on my way home from Lidl. I think maybe it’s something I’ve struggled with. I look at something like, writing about computation or anything I want to learn. And I put it on this crazy short time scale of when I’ll know it in depth and how I’ll learn it. Then, when I inevitably fail at that (because…planning fallacy) I consider it a fault of me for some reason. I think I can learn whatever I put my mind to if I want. But there is a limit on how quickly I can get there. If I’m going to try, I’ve have to be realistic with myself based on past experience. I Look at all these things as failures when I just didn’t really plan them realistically nor account for limitations in understanding.
  • The reason I link this to the Duning-Kruger is that I forget my average abilities in most things. That’s OK and I think I’m better able to accept that but being kind to this sensibility is important.
• Quantum computation
  • Just in general along the lines of what can computer science contribute towards progress. Maybe with the climate what are the things I could help out with.
• There may be some sense to have delusional positivity about oneself, even if someone says the opposite after all theres is a fabrication based on influences as well. Why not choose firstly, your own and secondly one that helps you rather than hindering you.
• Read some of The Library of Babel by Borges
  • Vindication, mans search for it.
  • Interesting. The quest for information in this information rich universe
  • The universe is library is infinite buts it’s books are periodic (because of the ultimate no. of combinations of the alphabet)
• 07/01/22 22:17:20 I watched Blade Runner for the 2nd time. I think I like the parts I didn’t like as much from the first viewing on the second one and vice versa. The slow pace and the ambience created along with the scenes in the decrepit house with all the puppets. I noticed that artificial light is constantly assaulting you. There’s no night or day it’s just this barrage of artificiality. It adds to the claustrophobia of it all. There’s a sense of isolation too. Like the outdoors is awful and theres large amounts of people but no real connection.
  • Theres over tones of automatons to Capitalism I think. Actually, not really Capitalism just the idea of implanting of experience and memory, without it would you know if you were a replicant or not? Are a lot of our thinking implanted too (probably not what they were trying to get across but something I thought about)
  • It’s interesting then how the replicatants have to show something of superhuman or unnatural ability to prove they are what they say they are. Otherwise how cold we tell apart from the test. Even the test could be kind of like a witch trial. Who are we to be the judges?
  • Maybe I’ll have more coherence in the morning…good night

08/01/22 16:48:16

Great Expectations is slowly turning into a bane of my existence. I do like some passages of it but at some points it just seems to go on and on. The way I structure my reading too. I think I enjoy it more when its an hour before bed or at 10min intervals throughout the day rather than some strict hour in the afternoon when I’m at my most ADHD. One of my favourite passages is that of home as Pip sees it after he’s ashamed of it. At some point it was everything to him but now its not. It’s an embarrassing past or just something he wants to be away from.

But, Joe had sanctified it, and I believed in it [home]. I had believed in the best parlour as a most elegant saloon; I had believed in the front door, as a mysterious portal of the Temple of State whose solemn opening was attended with a sacrifice of roast fowls; I had believed in the kitchen as a chaste though not magnificent apartment; I had believed in the forge as the glowing road to manhood and independence. Within a single all this was changed

This idea that what we have or had is no longer good enough. It seems meek in comparison to what we’ve seen to be out there, and what we should have. It’s interesting too how wise Joe and Biddy kind of come off, well, not wise but content. Pip kind of pities them but they don’t really need or want it.

Theres a respect for childhood concerns. “for we think feelings that a very serious in a man quite comical in a boy” it’s interesting to think that often times we are acting out our childhood notions in adulthood. With Pip constantly thinking about what Estella might do if she could see him. I can’t help but relate to be honest. Sometimes I feel I’ve my own Estella, she’s not one person, more an amalgamation of things.

That shame with home and the concerns of the small town. With Joe contentment of the forge and his belonging to it.

Pip also feels contempt for offence to this Estella as well.

”It was not that I knew I could never bear to speak to him about her, that I knew I could never bear to hear him creak his boots at here, that I knew I could never bear to see him wash his hands of her;it was, that my admiration should be within a foot or two of him- it was that my feelings should be in the same place with him”

It’s interesting how these emotions are so complex and honest.

On p.243 Pip says as much as I’ve said above really. The damaging effect his expectations (a function of Estella) are having on him.

Dickens has some extravagant language the way he describes things are kind of unique, just picking up on odd aspects of peoples demeanor. In saying all this I’m still struggling to read the bloody thing.

I watched a video about Blade runner. Talking about the ambience it creates etc. and how this along with Neuromancer created this cyber punk aesthetic (I noticed also that Syd Mead was the art director). It portrays (to an extreme extent) the squaller of tech advancement. The grim aspects, the class breakdown. Does it do anything more that create an incredible ambience and aesthetic. The focus on eyes is something I hadn’t noticed (ironically) specifically them as reflective, like a mirror. The entrance to the soul kind of. The attribute of a human, the tell sign, is there life in those eyes, is the humanity in those eyes?

Word of the day obsequious: obedient or attentive to an excessive or servile degree.

Feeling not bad today. Fairly content. Not really too productive. Physics could be going a lot better. I need to pretty much “re do” Chapter 5. It doesn’t seem like my fundamentals are as solid as I’d hoped. The first reaction is to say that I’m shit at Physics. While I don’t seem to have a natural ability for it I go back to what I said yesterday it’s all a matter of understanding it in your own way. Maybe I’m a mule going of the hill, overtaken by some stallion or fucking unicorn racing by but fuck it, I’ll enjoy the views as I go. I’m also not fertile which is shit but fingers crossed the one part of the analogy that doesn’t work. Haha I’ll write this in the Instagram post. So, the plan is to go back to chpt. 5, take notes and solve problems. Day off tomorrow, from Physics.

Other than that I’m feeling fine. I’m taking it easy on myself. By all accounts JWST seems to have fully launched so that’s something to look forward to.

It’s tough trying to get comfortable with the lack of dopamine world. Not jumping around. Not having comforts. It’s weird. It’s hard to just sit there and read for an hour because it’s so much easier cognitively to just browse Youtube. It’s left down to the individual then to create an environment where they have that long term, slower release gratification. Voluntarily doing that is hard, it goes against human nature in a way. I think once you get it going though it can be easier.

I watched a part of the French dispatch, found it incredibly boring. Like if literary criticism was a movie. Not that I’ve read any literary criticism. Theres merit to making engaging movies while making your point, I don’t know I might have missed it but I just didn’t really like it. Ah, I suppose theres parts that are OK. Like the first story about towns not really changing in 100 yrs and the one about the guy in prison who paints, just quirky but good I think. Same with the revolution one, it’s grand. I think it’s just not a format I particularly liked. Im sure others do.

09/01/22 18:38:33

So we’ve reached the end of another week. I watched a movie called Waves. It felt like a Shakespeare in that such pain is caused by an act done out of influences that if only revealed could have been mitigated. We don’t know why we don’t reveal these pain and confusing emotions we have. Instead we just express them implicitly in our actions. The music and general camera work adds a melancholy nostalgic tone to it. Pretty much like a Frank Ocean album. It matched up for me anyways though with the feelings of what could have been and how to live now. Acceptance is very hard, but it’s the only way to move forward I guess.

Went to the gym this morning. Got some tape will see how it works out for bjj tomorrow. I’ve yet to write out the plan for the week. I think what went well was the Physics and this. Most days I didn’t feel the need to work hard. But I did evolve a bit from where I was in general. Became more accepting, at least for the time being.

I watched a video about what poetry is. It seemed interesting but I wasn’t very focused. I also listened to Huberman about habits. Associating a ‘bad’ habit with another habit seems to set up your brain to think before it does it. For example, checking Instagram. If, every time I check Instagram it becomes a longer habit of check Instagram then go on Duolingo for 10 minutes. Now the action after a while becomes this more purposeful one. You can more consciously evaluate it.

Mood of the week: “And once I knew. I was not magnificent. I could see for miles”

Hopefully this week I can take a more hard working look to things. But some focus in to the tasks I carry out. Like Dan Gaoia who I wrote about before having to explain to his co workers in business why he was going to be a poet in terms they could understand (not in a patronising sense) but I find myself similarly entailed to figure this out. When someone says what are you doing all day, what do I say? First, whats the truth?

• I spend at least 2hrs studying Physics to understand in case any future opportunities requires this. I spend some time doing odd tasks like emailing, or preparing for skiing.
• I research things I could do, maybe stuff to do with the climate and how my computer skills might be useful (this isn’t entirely true).
• Then, the odd time I do research into things I’m interested in like the theory of computation or how combustion works at a foundational level.
• Try and find time to look at where I want to go in my career, hopefully gaining insight in asking myself these questions so I can make a more accurate decision if an opportunity comes up.
• Also, I’m seeing theres maybe odd jobs I could do for universities or causes I believe in like nuclear

At least, this is the ideal state. It’s a start I suppose, Kind of aimless but not awful. At the moment, I’m fulfilling maybe 30% of this. But I’ll get there. Is there a byte sized version of this thats socially acceptable. Maybe, I’m just trying to do some online learning for the sciences (if I want to get into the more climate side of things) and researching what jobs are in the space. Then doing some research on more general things I’m interested in, like combustion. That’ll do I suppose, Ill see how it tests.

I thought about the computational theory of mind today. How neurons and synapses at a moment in time could represent state and the transitions could be codified into functions. A question then arises if theres a template to these transitions, is there a way to reduce the function space. Even if there isn’t because the brain is finite you would assume that at some point it would end. What if each transition though is a brand new thing? I’d say the literature wouldn’t back this up, maybe we can clearly see things repeated. It’s fascinating to think that if we cracked that, if we could simulate someones brain in this sense what would happen. What would become of such a machine. I wonder why we can’t simulate this today, is it purely the complexity?

Lex Fridman was on a podcast with Huberman and they spoke about the eyes as an indicator of some sort of spirit of someone (or something, in this case they were talking about a dog). This reminded me of Blade Runner and how it operated as a kind of reflection, similarly to what I just described. It is true that the eyes can contain such life, such humanity. Its fascinating to think why that is, maybe theres an evolutionary explanation but even still, theres a complex emotion that can be communicated, possibly outside some utility need. As I’m saying this its seems this would be an argument in favour of the evolutionary perspective. The eyes as the window to the soul, which in turn is a mirror on ourselves. This is why curiosity can be interesting too, why do we care how things work, is that the Prometheus spark, a want to know the universe to interact with it? Supposedly Prometheus gave man knowledge right? Maybe this could be twisted to be Prometheus gave man the ‘idea’ of knowledge and from there he generated the tools to get it, from a book, from the evidence etc.

I think it’d be cool to learn an instrument, like the piano. Just to interact with music. I’d need to start just getting into classical music in general. Or at least analyse why I like the music I like. Classical music would signal more socially though. Or would it? Maybe I’d just like to be on the in group.

Also, just in general it’d be nice to know something that bodes well at parties, this is surely a terrible heuristic.

10/01/22 11:03:52

Interesting article about understanding

• This is something I’ve felt recently is that “will to think”. It’s hard to constantly be honest on whether you understand something or not. It’s nice to note that I’m not alone with this. Another interesting point was answering a question in multiple ways, playing around with it in your mind. So even getting the textbook solution right may not be enough or satisfy your own internal understanding, so having the integrity to pursue it until you fully understand. I’ve found this very much so in my own life. It’s referred here as the software and hardware. This will and pursuit of understanding is the software side of things no matter the specs of the underlying hardware. Maybe I have this decent software but very poor hardware. Maybe both are slow. I think though a lot of the times the only thing preventing me from really understanding is that “will to think” to be aggressive with it
• Recommends the sequences. Think this is A to Z rationality. Specifically “Noticing confusion”
• here, again, like Austin Vernon said, look at primary sources. But also have your own view, try and block out what you know about a thing or “should” know about a thing.
• I find things like multiplication and division, taken for granted as something like this
• Laura Deming on rage inducing research this could be useful in learning about combustion

I’ve though about getting involved in the data visualisation space. Do I like the end destination though, what am I striving to do there? I’ve thought, that maybe a good project would be to explore climate science, specifically the IPCC report and see how you can build up the evidence and analyse appropriately (aka do Science). This seems kind vague to just do what’s already been done. Data is fundamental though to our understanding of the universe, there is a cosmic perspective one could take

All that seems to be available is modelling and visualisation. And also general, more practical power consumption stuff. At some point, I might have to accept that no area is going to jump out at me. That just trying to do one that has a decent benefit.

If your actions seem beholden to yearnings that you don’t believe you actually care that much about, you’re probably not looking closely enough at your fears

Strictly in a career sense for the time being. Ranking the importance of the yearnings that I have. No matter the hierarchy some yearnings won’t be satisfied or fears completely resolved. Right now, the most important thing is social interaction, which isn’t ideal with COVID.

• Non negotiable
• Top shelf
• Middle shelf
• Bottom shelf
• Trash can

In some sense I think I’m scared of failure too. What if I try really hard at something and it turns out to be not useful, or a waste of time? I think about this with the different “projects” I have. I think this stems socially and personally. I’ll feel like a failure to myself (or damage my self-image) if I try something fail at it. Because I don’t try I can always say well “Maybe I could”. Then socially I want to get some level of respect or even admiration. If I spent my whole life doing what I was curious about or doing projects that never really succeeded I wouldn’t be able to tell people that I’ve done amazing things, that I wasted my life.

Just writing it out though, I can’t see how I’ll ever be satisfied with the above heuristics. I’ll just constantly ruminate. I have to move on from the ‘opinions’ of people that I’ve derived in my head.

I want to feel like what I do has a tangible impact too. Like a hard causal line to doing something beneficial.

I have this frustration too with anyone that’s really trying or something. I think it’s just an outward expression of maybe my own failures. Say, in Workday I’d get annoyed, like who gives a fuck whether this project is done or not. I just didn’t see any point to it. Partly, because it meant I had to give a shit, to become another minion and work hard. This, maybe, I felt was beneath me, I don’t know. It kind of comes back to it, it was hand’s dirty work and it could all be for nothing I could be doing something else etc. etc. but I think part of it was fear of failure. Or, also, getting trapped in a job. What did I fear about being trapped? Theres this social expectation that you failed or something if you stayed at a place, I have high expectations of what I am to be. These expectations dictate a lot of the above behaviour I think. Am I able to let go of them completely?

In some sense, I’m dissatisfied with the way my life is, I want more. I feel sometimes I deserve more rather than appreciating (and/or acknowledging) what I have.

The most rational approach might just be that internal growth metric, am I learning everyday with personal stuff and can I get a job that maybe does something I would find it hard to learn on my own or that isn’t high enough on the want to know list but would be good to know.

I started watching Euphoria. Jesus Christ, I didn’t feel fucked up anymore lol. Jeez sometimes I wonder if everyone is just going through it. Like really just struggling to be whoever they are. Constantly flip flopping a walking dichotomy. Some of the acting is a bit meh but it’s very engaging.

11/01/22 13:37:30

Not very productive morning. Handy man is here fixing bath so can’t really focus too deeply. Managed to get some Physics done this morning, still trying to understand Tension. Struggling with it. Also, spent some distracted time on Finite automata and trying to understand their fundamentals.

I’ve been trying to do some on Chemistry, to look at what chemical reactions are and then hopefully learn more about combustion. I’ve been trying to break the general discovery of things and materials down into first principles thinking. I get annoyed when I read how an experiment was done with sulfuric acid that showed this, but then I say, what is sulfuric acid? And so on. I think one thing to note is that these names are applied to substances with specific properties. For instance we might know of hydrogen as something that water breaks down into when a current passes through it. But how can we identify this same substance again, just in nature? How do we identify it like some birdwatcher who knows the particular markings of a bird. Maybe, this is similar in that hydrogen has other properties that make it unique in that it is in the class of elements but also in the class of a certain weight?

Another thing I learnt I guess is that atoms are never really destroyed they just undergo and overall composition change, the compound changes but not the atoms themselves. Different forces and thermal properties dictate this composition (I think)

It might be worth reading some science history books too. With some of these questions I have in mind (what are these questions). Next steps might be to read the short introduction to the history of chemistry and also to read Kuhn’s the structure of scientific revolutions.

Still struggling with understanding Tension. I just don’t know what I’m looking for. Why is it so obvious that tension is the same throughout a system of pulleys. In what circumstances does it change. Tension is the net force of two pulling forces. For a straight line with no mass in the string and the system in equilibrium the two pulling forces are equal. Tension is just the net of these two forces. So even in an accelerating body tension could be the same throughout the rope.

Great expectations seems to be a tragedy in the sense that people can’t get over there own problems. Maybe just Miss Havisham, who basically destroys Estella (And Pip’s) life because she had it rough. Money is also supposedly the saviour, the destination or at least high status. It seems the lowest “status” people are they ultimately good though. The dynamic with Jaggers is odd. Every one is so cagey around him, like if they slip up he’ll charge them with something. It’s an interesting dynamic, no one ever really feels comfortable around him.

I wondered why Pip felt a sudden sense of regret towards the end before Orlick nearly kills him. Why he could see that Joe never asked for a penny or anything and Pumblechook wouldn’t shut up.

Lots of different imagery in it, particular a looming convict, prison, chains kind of vibe.

I continue to watch Euphoria. There a cheesy quality to it, that is engaging. I don’t know why it’s so easy watch. Probably the drama. There is something missing though for me, I just don’t know what it is. I’m not a big fan of Julie in it, I don’t really like her acting but I can’t say that she’s terrible actor it’s just a personal opinion it feels a bit cringe or unnatural to me. I also, don’t care too much about the side plot of Kat doing camming or being a bad bitch or whatever. Maybe 2 or 3 character lines is enough? Not dogmatic on that though. The popular girls in it are very “dumb” and that but they’re supposed to be as far as I can tell. I does a good job of portraying people of all aspects. For instance, Molly who’s fairly sexually active and seems to really like it is shamed for it. It’s just interesting to see perspective’s that maybe young adults are currently dealing with. I personally don’t resonate with it, but it’s not for me. Theres a lot of taboo in it. Like a lot of shame internally for people because of who they are, or at least who they feel they are. This internal struggle is funny because from an objective view (of the audience) we can see they all struggle and we may not relate but it doesn’t always make you sinful and that. There a certain sense that the taboo is at fault, not the people. Even with the drugs. There’s a repression of everything. A repression of feelings about OCD or whatever Rue has and a lack of empathy maybe in dealing with it, theres a lot of sexual taboo and repression that must be kept that way for fear of it being revealed, affecting social standing. Those dynamics are interesting I guess, It’s where the drama mainly stems from, of secrets, hidden wants and desire. What your outward facing self does with those repressed things.

I’ve been feeling a bit more empathetic these days. Maybe it’s lack of testosterone or some bullshit but none the less, It’s helpful too for my own self-esteem.

I don’t think my thoughts drifted anywhere else today. Just not looking forward to the amount of thinking I will have to do tomorrow. I do find I’m kind of getting better at understanding how utterly confused I am most of the time (with things like Maths for instance) don’t know if that really helps, but it is the case anyways.

12/01/22 15:04:04

• Questions arising with this history of Science
  • The hope here is to develop some understanding of how we know what we know. Specifically in Chemistry when we say something like zinc oxide, how do we know that it is what it is. Or for the discovery of the structure of the atom, shooting beta particles or whatever, how do we know that they are smaller than the atom or produced by the atom or whatever?
• Questions arising with evaluating climate change
• Having one of those days where I’m hungry and anxious. Could be sleep. Still managed to get about 3 hrs of thinking or there abouts done, so I shouldn’t feel too bad
• Listened to some interviews of Robert Eggers. I find him interesting, he reads a lot and I admire how meticulous he seems to be. I forget the name of the guy he was talking to but he made a good point that when he wrote the dialogue the movie kind of became a reflection or in general is always some form of expression. The characters are saying lines all generated from the one person. This kind of reminded me of Oscar Wilde and what art is and all that, theres no way to avoid this mirror onto yourself.
• He also made a good point about the wonder of dreams being the experience or aesthetic of it. When you retell the narrative of a dream it can be boring compared to the actual experience. He thought that movies operate in this sphere as well as something unique to the medium.

I started reading picture of Dorian gray(?). The first few pages are just detail about art and what it is. It’s pretty interesting. It’s confusing, I couldn’t even begin to break it down. Art should be chasing a higher ideal. Art as expression isn’t art, the artist shouldn’t play a role in the painting. And then Dorian gray is this beautiful guy who inspires that search in the artist.

I thought a bit about jobs. I looked at maybe data analyst. Or I guess something to do with Kubernetes. I wouldn’t mind a job where I don’t feel like if I used all my brain cells in the day thinking on it it would feel like a waste. That’s what I felt Workday was like sometimes.

Also I don’t know if data visualisation is really tackling a problem

I’d like to use like Rilke or Poe or someone to start off with poetry. It feels like it’d be a good place to start

I’ve been disappoint really with my tenacity in discovering the answers to my question. I was reading an introduction to chemistry today and it contained good detail as a foundation to understand how different concepts are built up. What frustrated me was that it was tortuous to try and even read it for an hour, my mind was elsewhere. I think I was tired but still, the answers are all here if I just persevere but I don’t. Acknowledging it is something though so hopefully I can get better at it. It’s also the ease of distractions which is many

I made decent progress today in my thinking about Tension. There is no tension added or taken away as a rope goes around a pulley as the pulley remains in equilibrium with an equal but opposite force. Think I’m still confused but in a good position to move forward with questions.

There some sense in which I feel at a disadvantage. Ugh, this might go down a rabbit hole. But when I see people who are intelligent and curious and reading a lot and all that I feel like they don’t have this constant discomfort I have. For some reason I just can’t lose myself in the material. Theres a recalcitrance because it’s always routine oriented or something. Sometimes I don’t just let myself go though, to fall into it. There’s a resistance to it. I think too I’m expecting to use it at some point, like it’s hard work for a payoff as opposed to the learning being the payoff. Even learning about the history of chemistry I don’t see it as just learning even if no other soul knew I knew. I’m almost half expecting it to be quizzed on at some point in the future, or it’ll make me look smart or something. That’s also why I try and consume it quick or if I don’t understand get frustrated. There’s always this time element like I’ll have an exam on it soon in the social arena. It’s not to enrich my life, it’s to enrich other’s or at least to enrich how I look in the eyes of others. So, when people say, Conor just reads and stays in his room and is odd, I can say “look how smart I am” or how much things I know. It’s not purely this, theres times I am in the learning aspect but I think in general it’s fair to say that the social side creeps in a lot. I want to have this artifact of my “hard work”. I do enjoy learning things, but for some reason I can’t just enjoy it myself. It must be useful. Thats it I think. At some point all I read and that must become useful. If at no point I get to use it. It was a massive waste of time. In this sense then. Sometimes I’m asking questions of use about what I read. As opposed to questions I might be curious about. So say, read a book about China to understand how I might view them in popular culture and tell people how to view them in popular culture. Understand Ireland so that I don’t feel behind in some debate about it. I suppose it can be OK viewed this way but definitely when I enjoy reading is when I truly am learning things I engage with. Not the utility. It’s a balance I suppose but once again no harm in noticing it.

13/01/22 17:04:30

• Man, today was so unproductive. I just could not get it going at all. I picked up a few books. One on the history of Science which I’m looking forward to getting through
• I wish I could focus on things. I think I want to know about a certain thing but I can’t focus on it for more that like 10 mins before I’m bored. The limbic friction is too great I suppose sometimes.
• I just don’t want to do anything today for some reason.
• I finished the first season of Euphoria. Liked it, the musics great. Dreams and “Great expectations” in America. The ending is kind of confusing. Like Rue can’t leave, or really be the person Jules wants her to be. Those diverging paths after school. There’s a nice line where Cassie talks about the great thing about high school as the last time you can kind of dream. Until life just hits you in the face. Everything is kind of glamorous and pure in high school. Then, in some sense you’ve to be who you really are in the world, just this long stretch of life.

14/01/22 15:51:10

Bit more on track today. Managed to get over the hump in Physics. At this for now. There is no y force acting on the rope at its center, tension is purely pulling it apart.

I’ve been reading more about the history of science. The book I got is really building it up well. One thing I noticed is that most explanations for instance Aristotelian astronomy later modelled by Ptolemy fits a nice narrative, it seems it’s a way we want it to be like some compromise. This or the principles that compose matter being a trinity (chemistry). Its just interesting to see these human tendencies pop up.

Measurement is also very important. Having a way to analysis processes with numbers to be comparable and verifiable. Also, to be able to deal with quantities longer that a human life and to compose units based on units.

Theres a trend of understanding nature for utility as well. For instance the beginnings of chemistry seem to spread from using a oven for cooking, which was able to melt metal or to make pottery etc. All these processes were scattered however wit “home recipes” until some sort of structure or institution could be put in place.

I’m slightly confused about ‘air’ in the development of chemistry. How did we know it was there? I think you would know air by the wind. Some invisible breeze that destroys or livens the camp fire. Also fog or mist. How would you go about testing wtf this is made up of? To summarise where I am so far with my combustion research. First, what is a chemical reaction? A chemical reaction is a transmutation of matter. The defining principles for why it happens lie with energy and structural properties of the two reactants.

• How do we know the structure of the atoms in a material? Where do I start?

I think I need to reduce my screen time or something. It’s hard to be motivated to do anything with so many options.

Also, another cool idea from that science book is the idea that vision can be kind of filtered, by definition it’s more focused whereas our auditory senses are all consuming. “sight isolates, sound incorporates”. “A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness , a taking part .. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, putting together”

I’m a bit all over the place this evening. Why am I not reading or learning or doing productive shit? It seems what I should be doing 1) because smart people it seems do this 2) to be my best self surely thats what I should be doing. It’s hard to get around this. In some sense this comes down to, what are my goals? If I’m not doing something productive all the time I feel useless. I feel like I’m missing the point but just can’t see.

I watched an interesting called American factory. Really shows the disparity between China and the western world in terms of work culture and life in general. Life is about work for the Chinese whether they like it or not. What kind of life is that, they seem quite content with it, at least seem to. Theres no rights though. Apart from the emotional aspects to people having freedom theres no sense of error correction on leadership. To few people make the choices and there is not enough say from people. It’s hard to argue why people should have freedom in a purely formal context but the whole goal of just producing more shit, especially commodity goods can’t be it. It can’t be a meaning of life really to aspire to. I can understand being the best worker you can be “we all work, we all drop” etc. but doing something with meaning or having a beneficial contribution to the world, all along the supply chain.

I watched some videos on Great expectations. One interesting point was stated that Dickens sets up this idea of a world before photograph from the first page. A world that is a product of the story teller whether written or spoken. Theres symbolism apparently with tears and food but I don’t really find that too interesting I suppose.

The general theme that struck me was the narrative of expectation of dreams as a child. Here, I suppose Ms Havisham represents this remnant of those expectations. I think with any expectation, not losing yourself or those who care for you. Or who you were (Pip helping Magwitch at the start). Theres that impatience in me for the literary aspects of the book. It might be what makes it a classic but I’m not really interested in them for there own sake. I guess I’m trying to find was to live better from reading the classics, maybe this isn’t exactly the right way to go about it.

I don’t really have many original thoughts about I suppose.

15/01/22 17:24:16

How do we know what we know about the structure of chemicals elements. I think it would be useful to look at what perceptions we are using. If it’s a microscope then we might be able to ‘see’ these structures. If it is some effect of a structure, seen on something else, then the structure is ‘implied’.

Mystery of matter documentary

17/01/22 13:31:15

RF foster will be on conversations with Tyler. What better time to try and read modern Ireland again. Thinking of pairing it with Bartlett just to check for context and that.

Very interesting profile on foster

His book on Yeats sounds very interesting. Yeats is viewed as this kind of weird figure. It makes me think of how I want to view the people who affect our history as opposed to who they actually were. Also, this sense that to be a genius or what not you must have it all figured out, or not be socially odd (think Isaac Newton).

• Going into this next venture in Irish history I’m hoping to tackle Irish nationalism as an idea, how its changed, where it kind of begins and ends.
• My opinions on Irish nationalism are perhaps too simplistic.
• Why Ulster (for plantations)?

I started reading the information theory book again. It is an interesting field. The mathematical aspects are tough for me to wrap my head around sometimes, they’re not so intuitive. Especially when we talk about combinations or possible messages.

Prediction without explanation. Fourier analysis with Ptolemaic view of orbits

My thinking is to start with the period after the statute of the kingdom of Ireland (1541) up until the battle of Aughrim (1691). We’ll see how we go.

Right, so not exactly pretty but think I’m getting back into it. Just at the start of the plantation of Ulster now after the flight of the Earls. It’s always kind of memorising that slaughter, hardship and peoples whole lives are summed in a paragraph. Man mad famine, killing of woman and children, all just a couple hundred words. Sometimes I feel almost honoured to just read about others. To be able to take a vantage point that they never could.

As to why Ulster, I don’t think initially theres anything special about setting up plantations in Ulster as opposed to the other provinces. Connacht was probably too barren, Munster land titles too chaotic and Leinster pretty much sorted. Ulster seems to have the strongest Gaelic chieftains and Gaelic spirit(?) but will see how it evolves.

Theres an interesting dynamic of just not liking the English, even in the early 1500 as reforms from England came in for the spread of Protestantism the Irish did not seem too devout a Catholic. They did not seem well versed in scripture or anything like that, it was just a distaste for anything Anglican. I can understand it, its just odd I suppose to have such obstinacy of it, even if there might have been gain in it?

I started reading Star Maker yesterday. The opening pages are amazing I think. I started to fatigue a bit reading about all the different worlds encountered but the dynamics encountered in each of them is interesting, in how they attain planes of being. One interesting idea was a species that had eugenics to create a “person” with a more long term sense of the now, a more holistic view of what they were doing.

I was trying to think about Great Expectations and what I felt I took from the experience of reading it. The main thing I think of is how relatable I felt the Estella dynamic on Pip’s life to be. Pip’s expectations are a product of Estella, if Estella said “jump” he’d jump. There was no real need until then to have expectations, theres the paragraph about the “home” I’ve referenced earlier. The ultimate good things in Pip’s life are products of himself of his actual self, helping Magwitch, friendship with Joe and Herbert, helping out Herbert. There’s some element of satisfaction with himself that he (all of us?) must come to terms with.

I can’t really comment too much on the literary aspects of Dickens. It would be interesting to explore though, there seems to be great depth there (understatement of the year probably).

18/01/22 16:56:59

Maybe I should get some advice on where to travel too? I might need to rent a car too.

I thought today about Star Maker and how it puts moods, or culture on timescales. That the golden age of thought with the enlightenment was searching for a higher being of some sort and that we should still search. That there could be multiple planes of it, if we could only look at different scales.

I don’t feel I have as much to write these days. Going to the US seems like a nice idea but I don’t know how feasible it will be to have a smooth time over there. I didn’t get much sleep last night and I can feel it on my temperament today. I looked at a small bit of Irish history, mainly why the plantations in Ulster were important, not necessarily than the others but the Old English being the point of contact in Ireland was not suited to the Calvinist English as settlers who viewed them pretty much as the anti Christ.

I feel like Science is where I’m going to end up. Doing statistical rethinking today it made me think about all the useful tools for your mind you use in your research, asymptotically approaching what actually is. The problem is that no area of research particularly sticks out to me. Maybe I should just hone in on slight curiosities and see if it takes me anywhere. Often though, I find that I don’t even know what I think I know at a basic level. I often think that something along the CS route would make the most sense, just can’t think of what. I like the idea of computational science but I don’t even know what that really means.

19/01/22 21:31:39

I’m really dropping of the ol’ two pages a day. No thoughts of much substance this morning really, other than secondhand bookshops seem to have some of the best selection of books.

I read about the beginnings of the Ulster rebellion of 1641 and Foster’s reasoning of nationalism at the time. It’s all very interesting and mainly revolves around doing what suited the chieftains most. I need to get more familiar with the 9 years war to see the lay of the land for these events as by all account it’s a huge moment historically. At the moment, I can’t see why so that’s a question I’ve to answer. I will be a lot slower this time around reading but its a more question orientated approach which is good.

I’m becoming more and more convinced that research is whre I want to be. It doesn’t really matter what problem it is, just some problem. I’ve found that I really need to start starting. A lot of things are remaining in my head.

Statistical rethinking is going OK. It’s hard to see use cases as I’ve no ‘research’ to immediately apply it to. In saying that, it’s teaching me a lot just about basic concepts in statistics so it’s definitely worth persevering for that alone.

I thought about a mood board after a tweet from Ben Reinhardt; sometimes I’m inspired by things but the feeling kind of disappears. Maybe a mood board is something that could help that.

I’m going to try and finish A Picture of Dorian Gray this evening. I will probably need to read it again.

20/01/22 13:26:24

• Video on the earls of Kildare and silken Thomas. How the first earls had kind of struck a balance with the gaelic lords. Suspicion arose from Henry the 8th. The Fitzgerald’s were overlooked as long as they were taking care of Ireland. They started to grow in power though and with Gerald Fitzgerald moving soldiers (mobilising) it looked suspicious. Ireland was still medieval. Even Silken Thomas declaring rebellion he threw down the sword, a ritual from the middle ages. Eventually the house of Kildare fell.
• Ireland was not under English direct control apart from in the Pale. This changes when in 1542 Henry starts surrender and regrant to try and get the gaelic lords under control
• Ireland was not a cohesive whole. When policies of land regrant were trying to be passed you were constantly dealing with different kingdoms.
• Interesting article about what we admire in leaders
  • A mixture of a determined purpose and a sheer will to have it come to fruition

  • “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

  • Jobs seemed to have no inner contradictory self as we all seem to have.
  • Leaders taking the place of the religious
• Teaching
  • Interesting how culture might be the teacher in primitive peoples children are more expected to pick things up. In school maybe the curriculum is separate from the culture (the schoolyard)
  • finish tomorrow

21/01/22 10:51:19

• Beware the man of one study

  • How support for both sides of an argument can be clouded by the other side. He uses wage increases as a benefit or detriment to the economy as an example. Lots of accredited studies from University find different things even meta analysis switch back and forth. Any side could ‘convincingly’ present the argument for their own side.

  • This starts from the bell curve of studies, There might be a slight shift in the bell curve from one side or another but there is plenty of noise (malpractice, nuisance to the study where you’re not comparing the exact same ‘kind’ of study)

  • A high degree of skepticism then is needed for pretty much anything. For any ‘fact’ is there an equal amount of ‘evidence’ for the counter factual?

  • Try not to totally ‘believe’ things unless you’ve reviewed the evidence fully yourself (which, of course, is not always practical).

  • Need multiple studies of correlation for things, studies can show high correlation in the singular but not always across studies.

  • You could compare it to books as well. Rarely is reading one book on a topic, say in history, a completely fair representation of what happened. All sorts of bias and forms of procuring sources (laziness, lack of access) can affect the final result

  • There’s also an interesting post linked too in this one about explaining what Rationalism is. That just stating de-bunking of flat earth or homeopathy should not be considered a valid framework for analysing and getting answers to things. It further projects a notion that these things are ‘obviously’ wrong and you need to be ‘stupid’ to think otherwise. Rather than actually looking into the consensus and research to a level where there is extremely convincing arguments against it.

  • It’s an appeal to authority which makes one side no ‘better’ than the other.

22/01/22 15:34:45

• Speed reading
• Learning a language
• I’ve also been thinking recently about aligning the will with persistence for it to come to fruition
• How might I implement this idea of scaling tacit knowledge in my own search for…tacit knowledge?
  • I think this idea of open questions in the field is something important

  • Learning a field can take multiple meanings, it can be learning the content of the field, learning the social context of the field (what are the active areas of research, key labs, its history), or learning to do research in the relevant field.

  • The point of the post is to state a hypothesis that might work to further leverage gaining tacit knowledge of the expert.
  • Acquiring expertise can be sped up by a lot of examples in context. Sometimes this is why the tacit knowledge of managing can seem like drawn out prose. Writing down the knowledge and translating it is hard without examples
  • Using is salt bad as example of a question where you have two variables. An expert could probably give an overview and you could also find what the main issues are in testing where the inconsistencies may be. An expert may not be able to cite all this and any argument they give may be biased if you haven’t looked or scanned the research yourself.
  • You really need to ‘know’ the field to get an idea of the open questions or how you might accelerate the field
  • Tacit knowledge is that which is very hard to acquire (embodied in a person or group)
  • Theres public tacit knowledge, say, like learning to play an instrument or learn a language in the sense that things you need to gain to get the tacit knowledge are available
    • Another example here is when something is cooked, some ‘intuition’
  • Scaling private tacit knowledge is one of the main explorations of the essay
    • Is it possible to scale apprenticeship to experts.
    • The point here is the knowledge the individual you’re learning of knows. The public tacit knowledge is also tacit knowledge but of a different kind. In the private sense you could get both though. Say, from a guitar teacher.
    • An interesting example here is social tacit knowledge where something can be done, but no individual really knows how, the knowledge is embedded in the group.
  • Examples
    • Reading a research paper and breaking down, would you be able to run this experiment? Do you know why everything was done the way it was done? Can you create your own experiments. All tacit

    • The task is not to memorize the specific papers (after all they can be wrong) but to build a model from which the papers become predictable. A trivial example is if a paper claims an association between A and B and another between B and C, nowhere in the literature says that A could lead to C, but if one is aware of A→B and B→C one could infer A→C and then try to look for evidence of that relation.

23/01/22 15:19:16

• I’ve hit a point at least once a week where time seems to pass slowly and I get anxious and look for food or dopamine or whatever. Whatever I’m ‘supposed’ to be doing doesn’t seem adequate to cope with the change in horizons.
  • I’m able to recognise when I get in this state. And I’m pretty sure just pushing through it and working harder is the only way out (as it has to be done at some stage), but I often lack the strength to do that immediately. I feel sorry for myself and that
  • Losing sight of the ‘why’ of things is affecting me I think too. My sub goals may not be succinct or tangible enough, in general, and to the wider goals.
  • In saying all this, I’ve been feeling more empowered, specifically by the beware man of one study article to get a fair view of things. This is something that could really apply to analysing the housing situation in Ireland
  • This, paired with nintil’s ideas on gaining tacit knowledge of reading widely then honing in would be some thing I want to be conscious of and hopefully implement. All thats stopping me is laziness.
  • I want to write out my thoughts on web 3 as well very broadly taking the below example of making small bets on it, the things that look most promising but all outcomes are essentially unknown.
  • I also need to think about revisiting match tracker. Specifically focusing on the data viz aspects.
  • My lack of understanding frameworks in areas of interest is very real.
  • Funnily enough, I watched this video in which emmie is feeling the exact same way. It’s nice to know I’m not alone
• A really interesting review of Complexity by Waldrop
  • I never really thought about systems that may not be deterministic.
  • In these systems to thrive or take action you have to watch and make small bets (so that you can generally take the right path)
  • An example used is traffic. Trying to exactly predict how long the commute will take as opposed to a few things you a fairly certain about affecting outcome (like some company gets out at 6 etc.) of commute
• Meaning of Decentralization
  • Types of (de)centralization
    • Architectural: How many physical computers is the system made up of
    • Political: How many individuals ultimately control these computers
    • Logical: Are the objects or data structures that the computer processes interact with a monolithic block or amorphous swarm
    • One interesting example is language, which is logically decentralized. The language you speak to a friend and then what they speak to someone else does not have to be the exact same grammar or structure. The ‘process’ is conveying meaning, so language as an arbiter is not opaque
    • BitTorrent is logically decentralized but Blockchain isn’t?
  • The main reasons for decentralisation being fault tolerance, attack resistance and collusion resistance. It’s interesting though how these different aspects can’t just be taken for granted (as further explained) but must be worked on.
  • Makes point about good coordination, that of not creating one code line that is dominated by some small group of developers. And bad coordination, that a select group can dominate the mining of blocks.

24/01/22 13:02:34

• The main headache with match tracker is persistence. For it to be in any way useful there must be user data. Controlling that with authentication and all is painful. It might just be a matter of getting on with it.
• The whole app at the moment is just a data collector. I’m more hoping that it’s a data analyser. The data collection part might be useful. Is it useful enough though. There’s no real explicit template for collecting data.
• The problem is it would be easier to work with consistent data. So thats where the data collector app comes into play
• Realistically it just
  • Create users functionality
  • Tie games to users
  • Start game function that just does what was done before.
• The current plan would just have a set of seeded users
• 9 years war and it’s affects as I currently understand it
  • The most prominent gaelic chieftains remained in Ulster in the early 16th century
  • There was a slip up as to the tanist or successor to the O’Neill lordship in Ulster.
  • This created a friction with queen elizabeth, the irish fought off any pressure from the English
  • Shane the proud was succeeded by Hugh O’Neill who was brought up in the pale and had been to England
  • There was an ongoing battle with Phillip of Spain and catholics in Ireland wanted to support Spain.
  • Maguire (another gaelic lord?) attacked English troops in Sligo. Hugh took it back from Maguire. He told Elizabeth that he was needed to govern Ireland.
  • Bishops in Ireland were told that Spain would fully support any uprising they took on
  • Phillip wanted to prolong the conflict which caused the Battle of Yellow fort (?). Hugh could have sacked the pale after this if he wanted
  • Phillip sent troops to Kinsale to end the war and oust the English. Mountjoy fought of the ariving oneill and odonnel troops with Hugh barely surving
  • He got terms to keep his land but most earls fled. This left open large portions of land to be governed.
  • ”End of organised gaelic resistance”
• It’s such a hectic time in Irish history. A lot of it due to things happening in England and Spain.
• There is a real sense of hatred for catholicism and the confederates (of old english and native irish) after the Ulster rebellion. It’s interesting though that this hatred did not extend to Scotland? As this rebellion was based on what they did
• I think I learned a bit about the cultural revolution today. Because I started reading the three body problem. It’s really crazy how little we know about the history of China, I mean talk about man-made famine, my god.

25/01/22 16:38:51

• Made some OK progress with match-tracker today.
• Still need to set up session management and display user games
• Just trying to get the game logic working as in the connections between the events and games
• I listened to an interesting Huberman podcast about the mindset associated with eating or working out and how that can have negative effects on the brain.
• I can definitely relate in that I often choose a healthy option but either over eat or cause myself stress by doing it
• I was listening to Knees Over Toes guy on the Joe Rogan podcast this morning. His mentality was that he literally has no luck so he had to make it. He had to switch up his life to literally make it. I thought about this in relation to me applying it to what I want socially or academically. I’m not sure if I have the courage to do it.

26/01/22 15:03:45

• I’m starting to enjoy working with match-tracker a bit more. Just because I can use it to do neat code and really try and work through a whole build pipeline
• I’m eating to many god damn rice cakes
• Listening to Jordan Peterson this morning on Rogan. He had an interesting thought about when writing an essay write to answer questions you actually care about. This is where the majority of schooling is boring.
• he also talked about the foundational texts of western culture being built on top of one another. And that propagation of these texts and the stories in them must imply some sort of resonance with a large majority of humans throughout history. Even if the bible is arbitrarily the base there is some inclination for the stories we have and why we have them at the moment.
• Ok, so current plan. Fly to Austin in April and stay for a month. After that…no clue some research needed

27/01/22 12:33:50

• Physics is still being a sack of shit
• Frustrating day today with the match tracker stuff. And just in general. I’m feeling anxious. I think my sleep has been kinda fucked up plus the lack of immediate goals.
• I might have to take it easy with the Physics or just do an hour a day. It’s driving me nuts. Either that or spend time making some more concrete goals
• I had some thoughts about the random questions they ask in Atlanta, like are black women considered brunettes or what flavour is flaming hot. They do the off handed comment like that a lot. Probably not really to make a statement per se. I’m not sure.
  • Atlanta is full of those kind of mad moments in the narrative. The narrative keeps sweeping and you almost want to stop and be like wtf is going on
  • One I watched tonight about the barber taking paper boy about town doing random shit and just slowly falling into everything. Then paper boy realises he needs this barber. With all his shenanigans. Pretty hilarious stuff.
  • It’s just a kind of cluster fuck of things, or juxtaposition I suppose
  • Theres also proper drama thrown in too. Like the episode with the German festival where Earn isn’t necessarily the most likable, but he’s honest. The reality of the situation is painful. I wonder why they don’t just focus on these aspects? It just jumps from random event to random event and then life seems to happen in between all that.
  • To be totally honest. The show confuses me. But in a good way. The spontaneity is shocking sometimes, hilarious other times and just out right bonkers.
• I’m feeling fat and flustered as I mentioned. Had some hot chocolate. Ah, who cares though.
• What do I actually want to do? It changes week by week. Like at the moment I like working on match tracker. Because it’s mine, and its challenging
• Sometimes I think about feeling things. As in, the power of emotion, does it affect us as a society as much anymore? Does it affect me as much anymore. I can’t watch an episode of something and get caught up in it. I need some sort of gratification every couple of seconds. Not all the time, but most of the time. Of course, we can’t care about everything too much. But the general sense of being passionate about things. I’m not too sure about my staying power. Just sitting in the pocket of ones thoughts. It’s not necessarily uncomfortable just not as immediately gratifying.
• I’ve been reading the three body problem. I’ve been occupied by something mentioned about the information content of two images. One of this complex famous chinese painting and one of the sun with a clear sky and maybe one cloud. Liu writes about how the ‘plain’ image has a much higher information content (entropy) than the other. This point is extended further when Wang, one of the characters enters the three body simulation. He has the sense that “he could not articulate it. He suddenly understood that the makers of Three Body took the exact opposite of the approach taken by designers of other games. Normally, game designers tried to display as much information as possible to increase the sense of realism. But Three Body’s designers worked to compress the information content to disguise a more complex reality just like that seemingly empty photograph of the sky”. I find this interesting as an idea. What does all that hidden information represent or entail. In the plain photo there might be hidden details that contribute to an increase in the overall information content. So it’s what unseen by us (the human) that contributes to the increase in entropy of the image. Pretty interesting. I also see this as vibing with what Liu writes about the fundamental laws containing so much depth. That if they are disturbed (like that of invariability of the laws of Physics through space and time) then so much falls apart in higher level (or perceptual levels) so these simple equations have many levels of meaning. You might look at Newtons second law vs some algorithm that might compute or create an image on a screen. One looks flashy while the other contains depth. What is this depth though?

28/01/22 15:36:31

• Eventually got token authentication working. Just need to clean it up a bit now and write some tests.
• I’m trying to read about entropy in the info theory book. To be honest, it doesn’t seem very well explained. I’m trying to figure out why the idea of log makes sense as a measure of entropy.
  • Entropy is the measure of information. It determines for a information source how much uncertainty is in each successive symbol. The higher the uncertainty (the less we know about the next symbol) the higher the information content of that symbol.
  • The log value (to the base 2) of a decimal represents the reciprocal number that 2 to the power of the log
• Kind of tired today. Just feeling kind of aimless. I forget why I’m doing what I’m doing. It’s never enough. Maybe tomorrow morning I can spend some time writing out some stuff.
• I’m just gonna read my book for the evening

29/01/22 07:54:08

• This morning I was just hoping to take some time to look at how I’m getting on in what I’m doing

Things I’m trying to improve at

• Physics - to an undergraduate competence (knowledge)
  • why?
    • As a prerequisite if I end up doing the energy science masters
    • Improve my problem solving skills
    • Get intuition to understand the world through mathematics
    • Read the data of reality as we interact with it
• Computation theory - to be able to read Turing’s paper and critique simulation and computation theory of mind arguments (knowledge)
  • why?
    • As a computer science student I want to know the fundamentals of why programming languages are the way they are what is the limit to their expressibility
    • Understand an influential paper
• Cognitive Science - just general reading once the above is satisfied (knowledge)
  • why?
    • General interest
• Having more informed opinions by doing primary source research and using ‘Rationality’ tools (tool)
  • why?
    • Make better guesses as to what the right move is so that problems get solved
    • Learn about things that make up our everyday life like peer review, general standards
    • Get a statistical and probabilistic intuition of the world
  • Goals
    • Look at something like housing and understand the general space of research what works and doesn’t work so that I can have a heuristic for policies and conversation on the topic. (knowledge)
    • Do the above with many popular topics.
• Statistical rethinking (tool)
  • why?
    • Learn tools needed to see correlations and determine uncertainties in results. Heavily aligned with the above
• Fundamental economics concepts like growth (knowledge)
  • why?
    • Frustrated with the idea that a priori growth is the goal of all modern economies and why that doesn’t seem immediately obvious to me
    • An understanding of the above might help as a heuristic for what different political theories contribute to this overall goal or how their overall goals are different
• Programming (tool)
  • why?
    • Move my percentile slightly up in terms of programming ability
    • Have a language that I’m extremely comfortable using in many different contexts (repl, web app etc.) most likely Python at this stage
    • To be more employable
  • Goals
    • Match-tracker to be a fully functioning application
    • Program a Dapp to have a more in depth understanding of how Blockchain could be used
    • Develop a more in depth understanding of programming fundamentals (see computation theory above)
    • Get comfortable with data analysis and statistical analysis
    • Set up my workshop (Vim etc.) so that on a completely new machine I can recreate my programming environment
• Irish history, read and understand a dense text like Modern Ireland (knowledge)
  • why?
    • Obligation as an Irish person
    • General interest
  • Goals
    • Read and understand all the points in Modern Ireland
• History of Science - understand a chemical reaction like combustion by building up the concepts historically and intuitively
  • why?
    • Gain an in depth understanding of a phenomena
    • Gain understanding of the scientific method and how the concepts out of it are based on experiments
  • Goals
    • understand a chemical reaction like combustion by building up the concepts historically and intuitively

I found that in the past couple of weeks it’s been hard to context switch between all the different things in a day.

While writing can be a tool for understanding move abstract concepts. Programming could be a tool to understand the technical concepts. Or at least form another perspective

Framework to understanding

the general idea being to have a heuristic for what I’m doing on a day to day basis as part of a larger goal

To understand a concept, tools can be used to explore and gain insight into it. In this sense reading is also a tool. Tools help gain insight. The are not an end in themselves.

I would separate the idea of ‘learning’ a tool. More just gaining proficiency at it (once again, not an end in itself) e.g. if I’m trying to learn Python. The goal general is to become better at it to explore concepts which I want to better understand. The end here is to understand. Python is a means to that end even while learning it.

I think it’s a good attitude to say “what tools could I be learning or using right now to explore this concept?”

• Tools
  • Programming
  • Writing
  • Reading
  • Practice
• Knowledge
  • Physics
  • Answers to political questions
  • Economics I’m anxious for tomorrow. To be honest I’ll be disappointed if I don’t win.

02/02/22 10:29:05

• AI as the most important trend in our lifetime.
• Construction costs around the world
• Shakespeare; For some reason it occurs to me that we might have a sense of mass delusion about Shakespeare. If I read Shakespeare is it just peer pressure or placebo that I see his works as genius? How can I trust my perception, what would make me believe that Shakespeare is…well, Shakespeare? I wonder if he had contemporaries of the same calibre, was he the first to explore certain things? The only way to find out is to keep exploring his stuff I suppose. Maybe read around him too.
• The three body problem; nearly there with the three body problem. Something I picked up on was the idea of extra terrestrial intelligence as a symbol and how it’s interpreted being somewhat unpredictable. Theres something about the commoner there too. That seems to be the most generous, or the most intelligent or able to reckon human behaviour. The commoner as that person who is history. Who the tracks of history are made out of
• Irish history; Modern Ireland is tough going. Just so dense every time I read over a passage I get a different interpretation, and not so much in an exploratory way. It’s interesting to read clearly high level thought about Irish history and kind of fill in the gaps myself.

03/02/22 12:17:46

• Asset manager captilism
  • The rise of institutional investors like pension funds leading to the rise of asset management

  • In 1945 Households held 95% of US corporate equity

  • The top 1% owns 50% of all equity and Mutual fund shares
  • ”Institutional invesotrs suck capital in from lots and lots of people; give it to asset managers who invest it. The returns go back to fewer and fewer and the underlying assets become inherentely valuable (?)”
• Bayesian statistics
  • I’ve been reading and trying to follow along to statistical rethinking. It’s interesting and there’s moments where I think I get it. And then I promptly don’t. The general premise of a model confuses me. You have some set of observations and with new data you try and predict how it will fall within the current observation set. Also, trying to determine the causality between variables in a model. I suppose, once you have a model you can do both of these things.
  • With that, it also feels like there’s just Russian dolls of distributions. Each observation seems a distribution which itself is represented by a distribution etc. For the binomial distribution how do I get a quick conceptual map for the problem it’s solving?
    • What parameters do you vary in the function?
• Slowly trying to understand the english Civil war
• Plan to read some Rilke for the evening

04/02/22 10:12:13

• Trinity webinar about how degree prepared people for the world
  • I suppose it is important to check or review how up to date the curriculum will be. Also, reviewing what content is actually convered and what the end goals are, or what you will end up ‘knowing’.
  • Funnel them into “SMART Dublin” which works with councils to plan for the future. Could get involved in some of these projects.
  • Having a cohesive view of the future and being capable to deal with the ambiguity… whatever all that means
  • E3 is trying to look at the next 100 years of education. Claims that it’s very unique. Looking at the goals for the future thats why there is a combination of schools.
  • Could on campus accomdation be a thing

  • Applications from Postgraduate students will open on 7th February 2022.

  • Seems to be space to learn what you might be interested in
• Info theory
  • If we think about a blinking light. Say, its red. It blinks on and off. If we wanted to use this to communicate something, what would we need to imply?
    • That there is a pattern to the blinking. For the receiver to know this pattern however requires knowledge of it.
    • If we can define a set of symbols then. A reference sheet say. That time along with a blink is some symbol. We have all we need to start transmitting a message in this symbol language.
  • Nyquist looked at transmission speeds. For this example, he says that the speed of transmission of our symbols above is some proportion of the value of $log(m)$ where m is 2 as the ‘values’ we have for our representation is just a red light and then no light. In this case then, the best line speed we can get is 1.
  • In this sense, one light is a message stream. It’s slow but it can convey a message.
  • The addition of more current values, according to Nyquist, increases the line speed in proportion to the log of the values, If we had three different colour lights with the same symbology reference ‘sheet’…
  • If we had a case where there were more than one LED blinking how does the ‘line speed’ change. To send M messages, M being the number of LED’s at once, we need to be able to send all combinations of the M LED’s. This could be physical contstraints, maybe how they’re connected or something but this is the bare minimum requirement.
  • The ‘line speed’ is then the log of the number of LED combinations which gives us M again. So the line speed just scales by the amount of independent messages you could convey? Having three colours is now like adding an extra half source of message transmission so the line speed increases by 60%(?). And 4 colours is like adding a full extra source so the combinations now become 2^4 and log of this is 2, so twice the ‘line speed’.
  • What role does the base value of log play in information theory?
• Mis treatment of Children in Uighar camps, really shocking stuff
• Prediction markets
• S3E14 of TNG, is similar to the last duel, no deceptin evident in either sides story. Bothe ‘believe’ they are telling the truth. Ok, maybe it’s not really.

05/02/22 15:45:35

• Installed coc.vim in my vim config. Seems to pretty much solve my problems for js stuff. Now, it shall pester me here too. Lets try it out sure.
• Interesting conversation on a podcast with Dan Hardy this morning. About the inherint violence in people and how if we accept it and channel it, into spaces like, MMA then we can ultimately help wider society. I don’t know if we fully have to accept that it will always be there, I think we still need to change violence in society but it does make sense that MMA and the like is a path to mitigate it. Although, could it encourage it?
• dfsdffdsfd

06/02/22 20:35:17

• I really need to sort out my relationship with food. I think it’s mainly when I’m anxious, like I’m worried or something. Reminding myself to focus on other things should help. Sometimes, I’m full but I just want more. It’s like I constantly want to relive the being hungry then getting food experience. Maybe it’s in my personality to just crave that dopamine.
• It also feels like sometimes, it’s the most exciting part of my day. Like I rank it no. 1 on the list. Maybe I need to change that mentally.

07/02/22 12:59:56

• Reading Cryptonomicon made me rethink about Godels incompleteness theorem. The character of Turing in the book describes Maths as counting bottle caps. this is our best approximation at describing phenomena in the real world. Specifically, for Physics. Like, Newtons laws rely on relationships, equality, multiplication for scaling etc. this is the language we use to talk about what happens between bodies under the influence of a force. No matter what phenomena we see, can we always rely on us being able to translate it into Mathematics? According to Godel there are things that are the case (in the Physics sense there are portions of reality) that we can not prove are the case, that we can not derive or describe with the language of Maths (so in the Physics sense, there are portions of reality that we can not describe or predict, there is a limit to the language we are using, a limit for discovery) so that quite literally we are always asymptotically approaching reality. To take it into the induction failing sense, is there some element in that underdiscovered place that could completely shatter our whole idea of the universe at any second?
• I think one of the big blockers in understanding the universality of Computation is the substrate. Computation is substrate independent. As long as you have some physical or logical way to replicate basic operations you can simulate a Turing complete machine.
• Constraints for the housing system
  • How many sq is a 3 bed say
  • Whats the min. expectated cost for a 3 bed
  • How much budget do the government put (or need to put based on demand) using the prev. metric.
  • Who would have thunk it, there’s no straight answer to the above so far.
• Construction costs around the world
  • Using a survey and anecdotal experience.
  • Lack of correlation between high labour and material costs and construction costs. Could be due to a number of factors but might be something there
  • Interesting graph on the different types of construction residential to airport and how the US is higher than anywhere for airports and hospitals. This could be because they have the highest administrative costs.

  • This tracks US performance on infrastructure projects.

  • The US also seems to build some of the most affordable homes in the world
  • Land costs are not included in the construction costs shown
• So Shakespeare uses iambic pentamer. Is there a general rhythm in our regular speech? I assume we have different rhythms but still its’ interesting. Samuel Johnson quoted him more than any other author in his ‘A dictionary of the English language’

08/02/22 09:51:49

• Slow enough morning with match tracker.
• Struggling to focus too in Physics. Hopefully starting example questions now will help

09/02/22 10:29:42

• Heuristics that almost always work
  • If ‘experts’ start to all use the general heuristic (of say, some black swan event not happening) and it is then taken as a way to update priors (aka as more information) the expert is not useful (nor should it be considered more information)
  • Where is the information coming from to determine if it’s ‘new’.
  • The above can jsut sometimes mean that due diligence is relaxed, that the process that would find the answer is not used anymore because the answer is a given.
  • It seems similar to induction, where it’s intuitive for us to take the easier system 1 option.
• Fable of the dragon (Bostrom)
  • About aging and wh y we shouldn’t accept it.
• PG on Lisp
  • Expressions in mathematics like 1+1 return values (like 2). This is similar in programming to some expression returning a value. There is a syntax to mathematical expression
  • Interesting, so you have the operator ’ which quotes an expression so that it is not evaluated
    • ”This corresponds to the way we use quotes in English. Cambridge is a town in Massachusetts with 90,000 people. “Cambridge” is a word with nine letters”
  • Skipped the bulk of the text
  • These operators are a model of computation (like a Turing machine) but more abstract

13/02/22 10:34:41

• Who do I admire right now? Eggers, Stephenson? In terms of the ignoring of popular culture?
• How much entropy do I add to the universe, or even just how much energy do I consume on a daily basis. The most basic, of course, is food. But even just external heat and general labour (which could include that done by other machines).
• Context is scarce
  • Some good point here and rhymes with previous post about following the good analytical skills. This is really how I try at least to gain an understanding of most things
  • It’s interesting to think about gaining a way to purposfully understand context. So for learning things can you tune into what’s needed to get on the same track.
  • This is similar to the tacit knowledge above
• Probability explained
  • I like how it’s explained about refining the sample space. How any denominator is just ‘honing’ the sample space
  • this is pretty much the article I wish id written

14/02/22 11:10:26

• Book flights to Austin
• Get checklist for skiing
• Look into applying for E3 scholarship
• Tim Urban, on Lex, small incremental steps to a goal
• On Cohens analytical people yday. I thought about how I’m much more biased towards thinking the likes of the tech bros are right than many anti tech people. Pretty much because they are more analytical.
• I really need to invest in what I’m doing if I’m to get over this food thing.
• Get blog in shape again.
• I need to get better at Vim.
• Unproductive day… procrasination central

15/02/22 10:11:11

• Get a plan in place for reading Shakespeare what does it take to get the context!
• Finally reading Lyn Alden’s inflation guide

  • When broad money goes up a lot but gets rather concentrated, then the link between broad money growth and CPI growth can weaken, while the link between broad money growth and asset price growth intensifies.

  • This chart is interesting. Alden states several factors that are up for debate with inflation. Particularly the raise in standards of the consumer commodities. From this chart the value of the CPI has risen 26x to the present day. Specifically in the later half of the 20th century. Are we assuming at least a part of this is better quality of goods and then some other mechanism?
  • Got to around the Big mac test section
• Need to map out the chronology for Shakespeare. In terms of a year long project. Similar to reading and comprehending Modern Ireland
• I’ve been a bit all over the shop recently. I realised today that I spend so much time giving out to myself in my head. A lot of subtle negative self talk. It’s just not useful. It blocks me from doing things. When I’m doing Physics half the time is me saying I’m fat or shaming myself in my head.
• Quick one on influences I suppose.
  • At the moment any time I delve into the idea of ‘doing Science’ almost like some sort of religious service to the universe, its pure I love the thought of it.
  • As well as that I find I lose myself the most in programming. Whether I like it or not it’s something I can more easily get into a flow state in. Also, I know a lot of things about it and it has an element of crafstmanship to it.
  • Top of my mind right now is Tim Urban on Lex Fridman yesterday. I felt I could relate to a lot of what he talked about with spending about 3 productive hours a day. And that generally being a max.
  • I’ve been looking at a lot of Stephenson interviews recently, he seems like someone whos got it all figured out
• I really don’t feel like I’m in tune with myself these days. Like what I feel is clouded by my negative self talk and by memories and external influences. It’s all just a hodge podge of things layered on top of me.
• I read some White Goddess today. Myth is a tricky one. I found that I’m searching for this holistic explanation of everything. There’s general aspects to all these different gods or motifs to different stories. I’m looking for them to all satisfy some answer to an internal question. Like all these gods actually represent X, I suppose thats the case, with comparative stuff. In some cases too, I can’t relate because it’s a humanity that’s different than us. That cared about different things that were in awe of different things. Like moon gods, or demon’s all these reactions to the world.
  • I read that Rilke with the elegies created the first ‘modern myth’. If myth is a reaction to the world, to explain what we cant explain. To put it into a narrative then I guess the elegies (though I’ve yet to read them) in trying to handle the human condition do that
  • I also have some hope that it will explain it all. That if we have motif’s that reappear throughout humanity we can tame them. We can essentially reduce ourselves to sub routines.
  • The Jordan Peterson-esk kind of ad-hoc (or seemingly) ‘discovery’ of things hidden in myth just seems like hearsay to my. Actually, I suppose you could test the explanation, Deutschian style. Is it hard to vary. Myth, of course, is a shitty explanation but what about what you ‘discover’ in the myth? We take all the foundings of your story on the story and see if it all falls apart if any of the underlying varies but also, if there are multiple explanations for each founding. This last part is what I feel kind of subconsciously erks me about the soft Science.

16/02/22 09:22:40

• I wonder is there some way I can write code or prose to explore relative velocities and conservation in collisions? Does python do good animation, maybe d3. My main confusion is what it ‘looks’ like for the relative frame. It’s hard to visualise that it’s just our starting frame again.
• Pauline not skiing but staying Fri; Sat stay in munich; then Anime arrives leaves on wedns then all back
• Comparative mythology
  • Particularist would identify differences between different myths. That seeing the difference between themese helps us understand more than finding all the abstract similarities
• Maybe some questions for tomorrow. Why do we need institutional investment? Why can’t we fund all the supply with government revenue?

17/02/22 10:10:52

• Read a excerpt about Revenge of the Sith from Camille Paglia. Fascinating to put George Lucas in this light
  • ROTS as a paitning or a rhythm, the dialogue and plot not really essential just a composite of the whole. Aim for this sense of emotion to guide you through the story, some visual experience.
  • The final duel as a dance. Two brothers speaking through a physiciality.
  • ”Expand our universe!” Lucas says to artists. Which is incredibly inspiring. Lucas admires technology but has this respect for nature from the second handedness of the technology to the positive association of Green and grand natural landscapes
  • There’s these raw motifs of things like history repeating itself, the prodigal son etc.
  • Argues here too how women are represented in Star Wars
• Lyons again
  • Discussing the ‘forgotten middle’

  • given prevailing construction costs and yields, as well as the tax system, the construction of new rental homes is only viable for households with a gross annual income of at least €100,000

• Where

07/03/22 09:43:44

• Should I learn latin?
• Unproductive in the task sense today. Just focusing on reading Cryptonomicon.

08/03/22 08:59:55

• I’ve wanted to learn a language, latin seems a good place to start
• Working title “How we reason about things we can’t see”. Hoping that I can cover how we know the incredibly small or how we create models of things in our heads (like gases) from experimentation. It would also touch on epistimiology I’d say. Where to start though
• Should I get a health check?
• Information profile on myself ?
• Now when I’m reading introductions to Latin like from this book https://archive.org/details/latinforbeginner00doogrich/page/n21/mode/2up I read it like the lotr and it’s fascinating.
• Here I go, tryna write some thoughts again.
• Mostly on my mind today has been the Lord of the Rings. The idea of a ruinic past. Pieced together through tales and language is so intriguing, escpecially because it’s actually the way our history is. Latin this lost language to uncover what once was and what was once thought.
• I wrote above about Paglia on Star Wars how technology could inter mingle with a mythic atmosphere. In a way Star Wars is the science fiction lord of the rings.
• I’ve been thinking a bit about my information footprint. Inspired by Cryptonomicon to try and get a handle on it. Shards of information about me are scattered everywhere. Every website I visit contains some. What to do with that idea that I’m some sort of fragmented creature on the internet.
• Elon Musk said before that money should be thought in terms of information theory. Stephenson talks about ‘infotropic’ organisms. That veer towards information, seek it out, just like a plant needs and seeks sunlight. International finance, or just a small financial system (to not be too grand) operates on information. That is, how money is distributed is data, who gets it, who gave it to who. All these things are just information. The system operates under some form of regulation to maintain consistency and fairness but in terms of other forms of manipulation and examination exceptional to humans. Is it just information theory? This is all very vague in my head. The crypt in the book is just a store of value on the internet. People put their money into it and can use it on the network to operate with others on the network. In this sense the network gives the money it’s value. In that case I suppose it’s not really information theory which I would consider more to do with communication between nodes. The network gives the data in the network value (transactions, ownership etc.)

09/03/22 17:02:33

• I have too many books to get through at this stage.
• ”show some fucking adaptability” - Bobby Shaftoe

• Every creature leaves traces of what he was; man alone leaves traces of what he created

  • Reading ‘the ascent of man’ Lots of pictures, which is good. The first chapter has a fairly engaging account of the evolution of man. Specifically the hunter aspect of man made him always on the move, density had to be low. Also, I never really knew that man kind of existed in between ice ages and it was only after the last one that we really got going. The main idea seems to be that of imagination, thats what seperates man from animal. Imagination in this sense kind of relates to the idea of creating narratives. The push into the hypothetical future or past and analysis of results. I don’t think that that alone fully defines the difference, for instance where does our logic come into it? Where does the consistency of story or the right and wrong answer come in.
  • Another interesting example is that of the Lapps who are ‘transhumance’, they migrate with the herd they hunt using it as a ‘mobile resevoir’, the difference here is that they are not biologically tied to this way of life, they are just ‘culturally’ tied to it. Man, creates things, actions and behaviours being something that we also create, as a community and within ourselves. This strums on that imagination string as well. Imagination is abstract enough to encapsulate physical and metaphorical creation of things I think too.
  • When man became meat eaters they were looking at larger game. Bronowski says that this could have changed the neural wiring of delay between stimulus and response, to postpose gratification of desire.
  • It was interesting too how B talked about using abstract maths to analysis difference between early human teeth and that of the ape. The idea that man could come to this point of creativity to solve issues about himself.
• Cryptonomicon refers to people a lot as sacks of chemicals. It feels kind of exact in a digital space as the lines blur. Concepts of eachother can take on different shapes in our minds that the physical sack of chemicals. The things that make us who we are seem multifaceted (social interaction, personality, thoughts) but seemingly defined by the sack of chemicals. Internal representations of eachother in our heads are more real(?) than the sack of chemicals?

10/03/22 07:10:28

• Trying to get my bearings again today on the history of Science stuff
  • How does a vacuum pump use pressure, how does it work?
    • The density of a fluid is generally regarded as independent of pressure
    • A fluid can either be a liquid or a gas, one considered incompressible the other compressibl
    • A fluid is a substance that can flow. It cannot maintain a force tangential to it’s surface (surface here being that which is in contact with the container). It can exert a force perpendicular to it’s surface
    • There is no ‘orderly long term’ arrangment in a fluid like the crystalline structure of solids.
  • How would one build up the theory of the ‘airs’?
  • History of the barometer
    • Interesting to note here how a vacuum was naturally unintuitive
    • Think I’m slowly getting the ideas with pressure.
    • https://catalogue.museogalileo.it/indepth/Vacuum.html
• I should be reading about properly fetching and contexts in React after this is mildly tidied up and uploaded

11/03/22 08:50:17

• The question of the day is still the basic operation of the air pump. Once again, I’m hoping to get an idea of what was known around the time of its invention
• I wouldn’t mind taking stock of where I am with things. Have a I wasted a load of time studying Physics.

14/03/22 15:05:22

• Tolkien on Beowulf

  • The dwarf on the spot sometimes sees things missed by the travelling giant ranging many countries. In considering a period when literature was narrower in range and men possessed a less diversified stock of ideas and themes, one must seek to recapture and esteem the deep pondering and profound feeling that they gave to such as they possessed.

  • On attempting to recapture what may seem trite and ‘basic’ ideas in Beowulf.
  • I think the main criticism is that it spends too much time on unimportant aspects of the narrative. Describe as ‘weighty’ (?)
  • Notes the rare appearence of a dragon, one of two times in northern mythology (?). The poet seemed to have a fondness for the dragon.

  • There is something irritatingly odd about all this. One even dares to wonder if something has not gone wrong with ‘our modern judgement’, supposing that it is justly represented. Higher praise than is found in the learned critics, whose scholarship enables them to appreciate these things, could hardly be given to the detail, the tone, the style, and indeed to the total effect of Beowulf Yet this poetic talent, we are to understand, has all been squandered on an unprofitable theme: as if Milton had recounted the story of Jack and the Beanstalk in noble verse.

  • Goes on to argue why we should pay attention to it. That it seems probably the poet had some design behind it.

  • The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography, as our poet has done.

  • Myth is a whole or none at all. That falls aware upon vivsection (or something like that)
  • Tone: the writers attitude
  • The foes of Beowlf are that of christianity. Not that I know what I’m talking about but the monsters seem more like Milton’s devil than enemies of heroes in the Greek age.
  • Fate washing away all mans workings and glory. But still with a strong belief in this ‘doomed resistance’
  • On gods in the north vs the south, more human, within the chains of time

    • they had become in their very being the enlarged shadows of great men and warriors upon the walls of the world. When Baldr is slain and goes to Hel he cannot escape thence any more than mortal man.

  • Tolkien said that the south must go foreworth into more thought than back to anarchy
  • The monsters are front and center in Beowulf but they have no honour, or courage.

15/03/22 12:38:34

• I’ve been having a bit of trouble with momentum problems these days. This morning I tried to untangle where momentum plays a role in a system. I struggle, when I first look at a problem to identify the conserved quantities. It all derives really from the forces in play but I don’t always pay attention to this, nor do I always know where to start with it.
  • Most of the time when I’m frustrated like this is due to lack of understanding, or at least maybe just changing my conceptual models that are being built upon.
  • F = ma on it’s own is instantaneous. It a tiny change in velocity. $F=d/dt(mv)$ says the same thing as F = ma its just if we integrate over mv we get a change over time. If you integrate over ma you’ve a change over velocity.
• Read an article for match-tracker stuff, maybe on fetching data.

• By reducing each machine to a number, Turing has also made it possible, in effect, to generate machines just by enumerating the positive integers. Not every positive integer is a valid Description Number of a Turing Machine, and many valid Description Numbers do not describe circle-free machines, but this enumeration certainly includes all circle-free Turing Machines, each of which corresponds to a computable number. Therefore, computable numbers are enumerable. That’s an important finding, although possibly a disturbing one, for it implies that most - nay, from what we know about the extent of the real numbers, virtually all - real numbers are not computable. This revelation, combined with some mathematical paradoxes and investigations

  • Need to think about this one a bit
  • If you enumerate all the turing machines (but the integers are infinite?) you are left with a selection of computable numbers (those that are a result of the machines you’ve just enumerated)
• Latin not going too well, hoping the books will help this.
• There is a limit to how much I’ll be able to do in life. What I can cram into my brain and what I allow myself to do. It’s painful sometimes to think about. It’s impossible to cater for every mood you might be in though. If you wished you did this or that, when this and that required exceedingly disparate interest and time to do. It is an excuse I know but also it’s more realistic, for who I am anyways.
• Ascent of Man

  • A system that describes the magnitude of a place must provide for the possibility of empty spaces

  • It is an interesting chapter on the role of Maths in our observation of the world. I just didn’t feel like reading it.

16/03/22 16:05:41

• I’ve to write an application for Trinity accomodation.
  • I dont plan on being employed during my masters
  • I don’t have easy access to view accomodation
  • Similar to most this is my first time attending university in Dublin. Having accomodation sorted would help that.
  • Hoping to meet people and have the oppurtunity to interact with all Trinity has to offer (in terms of societies and gatherings). Engage.
  • I’m pursuing a masters in Energy Science for the 22/23 academic year at Trinity. A small bit about me: I’m originally from Galway, I’ve lived in Dublin on and off (currently off) for the past 2 years or so for work. I’m currently living at home, finding accomadation from Galway will be difficult due to an inability to attend viewings on short notice. I don’t plan on working through my postgraduate degree, hoping to put all my time into my studies. The accomadation on offer provides much more affordable places to stay and amenities. I’m really looking forward to engaging with all Trinity has to offer, from societies to general gatherings.
• Interesting article about a speed skater training
  • It’s interesting that he included other things to aim for in his training apart from just the olympics. So doing a 100 mile run, he aimed for it along with the grander goal
  • Expanding himself outside of the sport too seems important. When it’s not the be all end all it’s more fun, more engaging, done voluntarily. It’s not this thing that must be done because too much has been sacrificed

  • I never felt sorry for myself, no matter the hour, wind, rain or temperature. I volunteered to do this. I wanted it because it was hard and throughout the training sessions I tried to keep that in mind. I questioned my decision to be a speed skater a lot, but I didn’t question it when I was suffering, then I only got through it. I left the questioning for rest days.

  • Really has emphasis on the voluntary aspect that gives him power to confront things

    • [On performing in competition] But today it’s a walk in the park compared to when I was a kid. This development was mainly acquired through continuous voluntary confrontation with the challenge (read that sentence again and emphasis voluntary). It was first when I understood that, or felt like, I volunteered, that I was able to compete with a free mind.

  • Traing what you practice for. Don’t waste time with much else. Although maybe some for injury prevention

  • It takes mental toughness to get through that. However, the monotonous program exposed me to those sessions so often that they became very familiar mentaly. In the beginning of each Season I was quite nervous prior to the hard or long sessions. But, as I repeated them over and over the anxiety level dropped and a few weeks into a training season I was totally unconcerned about tomorrow’s session as I went to bed.

  • So even though other skaters had millions of euros going into their careers, I was able to skate faster than all of them, because I had found a way to enhance my performance with ice cream. To me the challenge was not about suffering, but finding a way to endure hardships with ease.

17/03/22 14:03:19

• Reading Rilke this morning. I still can’t quite figure out what the fuck he’s talking about. It’s intersting to note that he started them in 1912 or so and then completed them in a quick spurt, somewher completely different ten years later. Supposedly it tries to address how we live with our new, modern solitude. This, I don’t really have a concept of I think as Rilke speaks of it. I think it’s there somewhere though. There’s this creation of meaning outside of some story (that religion might offer). Maybe it’s just that I’ve gotten so used to it as normal that I can’t relate to it. I’m not sure.
  • I do enjoy his other poems, his reteling of Orpheus and the one on the statue. Supposedly inspired by this guy, Auguste Rodin, who taught him

    • the idea that the aesthetic object intensifies and exceeds the objects of the natural world… the tension between the stillness that appears to characterize a finished work of artt and the vitality that it expresses

• I was slightly enchanted last night, reading the lotr of Tolkien’s description of Arwen

  • Young she was and yet not so. The braids of her dark hair were touched by no frost, her white arms and clear face were flawless and smooth, and the light of stars was in her bright eyes, greay as a cloudless night; yet queenly she looked and thought and knowledge were in her glance

  • What does grey as a cloudless night look like, it sounds beautiful, maybe it’s the emotion you get at looking at such a thing, is the same emotion you feel looking into Arwen’s eyes. A description like this can border on nonsense I suppose, if you want it too. Yet, for some reason to me, it’s enchanting. Like what you like I guess.
• Trying to udnerstand meter and rhythm, it seems just a classification of what naturally arises in our speech. Maybe it’s more to do with noticing how I use rhythm in my own speech for emphasis

  • In most English verse, the metre can be considered as a sort of back beat, against which natural speech rhythms vary expressively.

  • In this sense what meter is chosen or trend it follows maybe does signify emphasis
  • Prosody

18/03/22 10:02:46

• The causes of the Ulster rebellion seem muddled up in the English Civil War at the time, specifically, the dynamic of the scots, and the Ulster scots.
• Info theory
  • referring to 04/02/22 10:12:13 above, the idea of transforming some singular point of light into an information carrying system. This is similar to pulses from star, at what point can we say, that star is communicating some meaning or knowledge. Similarly, In Cryptonomicon, Waterhouse talks about looking at a square wave of him walking, putting an led on his head and monitoring him going up and down the curbs that he walks. Looking at the wave after, could you identify some pattern and say “this is san fran, or new york or whatever”. If you had these patterns for a large number of people, is more information conveyed? Is it just pattern matching?
  • After all, even in the blinking light sense we’re looking for a pattern. Once found we need a common ‘meaning’ for that pattern. Like in Turing Machine, when the Universal machine looks for a pattern in the standard description it needs something to identify this pattern, in this case “what does it do” in the narrow sense of the tape and its capabilities. If no instruction is found, then move on or stop.
  • In Waterhouse’s case, identifying the pattern, the landscape for what it could be is large, there is no instruction set (alphabet) to cross reference. Narrowing of this space would require predicting the pattern, developing some theory that can predict it. How does this fit with entropy?
  • Why binary digits? easier to work with, can be used to produce the other base systems. Coming back to the counting bottlecaps from Cryptonomicon, any conveying of language is counting first. In the sense that a blinking light, to get information from it requires categorising the amount of blinks and delays etc. and translating it into some common language.
  • The symbol could be anything. It could be a green or blue light, a word in the english language, a number on a display. Provided there is some finite probability that it will show. And that this probability does not change throughout transmission.
• Do I need to pick a project and stick to it?
• Feeling very deficient in my programming and general computing ability. Need to understand my tools better!

19/03/22 09:54:46

• Tolkien on beowulf again
  • Says, Beowulf should be viewed as a composition like a sculpture as opposed to musical.

  • Language and verse, of course, differ from stone or wood or paint, and can be only heard or read in a time-sequence; so that in any poem that deals at all with characters and events some narrative element must be present. We have none the less in Beowulf a method and structure that within the limits of the verse-kind approaches rather to sculpture or painting. It is a composition not a tune.

  • Tolkien says that the anecdotes and somewhat redundant stories add to the poem, they create a time before

  • it used knowledge of these things for its own purpose - to give that sense of perspective, of antiquity with a greater and yet darker antiquity behind. These things are mainly on the outer edges or in the background because they belong there

  • The dragon as a significant foe. “Triumph over the lesser and more nearly human is cancelled by the defeat of the older and more elemental”

21/03/22 09:06:35

• I’m so sick of doing collision probelms. I’m so shit at them too. I don’t think theres a question I don’t need some help from the solution with.
• Modern Ireland
  • The Ulster rebellion seems to initally have been a kind of ‘ode’ to what the Scots did to the Crown. A suprising show of strenght to have any sort of oppression emphatically resisted. This was lead by ‘deserving’ irish who had integrated well into the new plantation structure, they were worried that the oncoming parliementary influence that was in theory going to take over England would then in turn be implemented in Ireland causing them to lose parts or all of their lands. They did not seem to know of the circumstance for the more regular Old Irish that seemed to have been very oppressed by the plantation system in Ulster.
• On finding Outliers
  • Really good desription of heavy tailed distribution with plenty of examples. It’s better to look for lots of outcomes in the heavy tail distribution rather than in a light one. Picking the best apple out of a pit of apples as light tailed you’re better of comparing just a few rather than all the apples as the difference between the good and the average is small (not so with heavy tailed distrbution like a job or relationship or a startup)
  • Identifying an outlier

    • think ahead about what you’d expect a potential outlier to look like, instead of trying to think ad-hoc about “is this a potential outlier?” for each candidate.

  • Fast feedback can be a good form of determining if your ‘search’ is working but not being completely dictated by that feedback (doesn’t align with values or something).
  • Don’t get discouraged if you do the same thing over and over and it doesn’t work, if you’re applying some sort of rational to the selection process and/or know what a good outcome is.
• Questions for meeting today.
  • Prerequisites for the course, in terms of what I should be learning now to prepare myself, coming from a non science course. Is there any resources or people I could reach out too (I know theres a session next week with information about the course)
    • Reach out to team, on the 29th.
  • Any groups that I could be getting involved with for above.
    • Maybe around May more of a group of students.
  • Any advice in general for the course or general inititive, timeline to be approaching accomodation or general readings, people to reach out too etc.
• What are my strengths? In general, maybe in learning, maybe athletically.
  • Learning first or strengths to use for learning
    • A curiosity of root cause. Or more, a need to discover some order (or form) to a concept. Often, this causes frustration as i ahve misunderstandings about what I actually know, or haven’t really address how I’m thinking about a topic. I still think the intention is a useful trait though.
    • Self discipline; often in a motivation draining sense though. But I still think I derive more pleasure than most by having routine and sticking to it. It’s useful for aggregating over time.
    • A frustration with not knowing. not really too sure if this is a strength. I think If I can turn it into a more positive characteristic, or just have a more positive response to it, that could be useful.
• Reading as a guide
  • I was thinking of what Tolkien says about a myth or story being all of it, or none at all. A bit like breaking down why a joke is funny, it’s just not the same. While this could be useful as a literary study, I think ultimately the experience you have reading something can’t be wholly recreated in some review or by extracting what you think made you feel a certain way. Describing what you liked of course is important but I would more put it into this guide framework. Delving into what you liked delves into yourself. Kind of opening up passageways within yourself.
  • For instance, Star Maker, I liked the first 30 pages or so, mainly the language and the feeling of interaction being like that of the planets. Theres kind of musical aspect to it. You could go through and pick out points of language and I guess thats not completely useless but hmmm. If you look at the emotion it creates while reading it. No, that’s exactly what I just said we shouldn’t do.
  • Ok, maybe reading can also be a guide, no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.
• Theres a lack of cohesion to what I’m doing with most of my time these days. I literally have looked at nothing energy related. I think I need to start developing projects around this. Just as a consistent theme. There needs to be some exploration here. Like it doesn’t ignite the curiosity immediately but that’s because it’s too general. The things I can explore within it while having the over arching utility aspect of it.
• Info theory:
  • If we have an information source with an entropy H. If H is zero the source conveys no information. If H is a whole number, we need that whole number of binary digits (the base of the log) to convey the state of the source at any time. If H is a decimal of some sort. We’re not sure if we’ll need to convey all the states that t he source might have.
  • Christ, this info theory book is dull

22/03/22 09:24:24

• Modern Ireland
  • European wars on Religion Quite the list
  • Even just the formation of the confederation is so confused. Old English interests are not straight forward. They want to be independent legislatively but still want to be loyal to the king. The old Irish don’t have the same sentiment and want to establish a Catholic state which is heavily influenced (and in all hardly helped) by the papal nuncio.
  • It would be interesting to try and get a gauge of oppression of the Catholics at this time. For instance, what were conditions for those old irish that rose up and massacred the Ulster settlers. Are those that did well on the catholic side out of the plantations an extreme minority?
  • Penal Laws
  • Politique; Royal Prerogative
• What do I want to do? What projects could I start working on?
  • Is this just a lot of trial and error, whats the first small project that pops to my mind? How can i generate lots of micro outputs for feedback quick?
• I was thinking on a walk there. Working on sustainable energy solutions is a decent first abstract step. Recently even with the conflict with the Ukraine the dependency aspect of our energy sources is massive in terms of creating friction. It also satisfies the Physics sense of things where you’re interacting with possible the most fundamental law in the univers (the conservation of energy).

23/03/22 09:48:39

• Saw a thread on writing history. To start with a paragraph. Trying to just write a paragraph on what you think you know.
• Modern Ireland
  • I like how part of the third(?) chapter is told through the eyes of the papal nuncio. Vibes with the above advice to relay the story through a person
  • Looks like im starting in the early 15th century… again.
• match-tracker When can I add an optional handler when there is certain events. For instance, when there is a goal, update scoreboard. When there is a card, update cards beside scoreboard. When there is a sub update player number
  • Look into how prod db and test db might use the same commands. Altering table
• Why constraint on energy is unrealistic and how we should change our vision to using more clean energy
  • Interesting video. Coming from the whole ‘we can’t expect developing countries to just not get the standard of living we have’ its important though, I hope a lot of people watch this. Interested to see what she releases next.
• Thinking about increasing my freedom and controlling my information profile
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQM-GWKdHsU

24/03/22 16:55:34

• housing post
  • Right, so this is confusing as ever. There seems to be valid points from both sides political. I’m not convinced at the moment that vulture fundings are pusing out ‘our own people’ my current thinking is that the policies were implemented to keep up with rental demand. That is build to rent complexes. With all this, breakeven cost seems to be an issue. The supply we need won’t be supplied from private individuals, so can it be supplied from the state? How might they do that? They would need money, a lot of money. If it’s 440,000 on avg. for a three bed. Then to build whatever the demand seems to be, like 10,000 houses a year I think, thats 4.4 billion needed a year.
  • Hearne claimed somewhere that taking the assistance pay and just using it to build would cover costs, solve the crisis over night. That just doesn’t seem to be the case. Construction costs are too high for that.
  • Maybe construction costs can be reduced somehow looking at regulation and the like.
• Lex fridman and Judea pearl
  • We invent causality from correlation.
  • Causal logic on correlation
• Ireland 15th century
  • According to Bartlett the gaelic irish in the 15th century had feuds just like they did in the 11th with succession through a pool of candidates.
  • The general social structure of brehon, poets, physicicians
  • Gaelic Ireland was pastoral and hence nomadic as cattle needed to follow the seasons.
  • They had a diet largely of meat and dairy.
  • English saw this as a primitiveness, in that they weren’t producing bread.
  • The Oneilly dynasty in Ulster begins to emerge. The O Domhnails in west Ulster also began to emerge and conflict with Connacht being the firs to use guns in warfare in Ireland in 1487
  • From a translation of expugnatio by Gerald of Wales describing the events of Diarmuid and Tiernan.

    • Mark Anthony and Troy are witnesses, almost all the greatest evils in the world have arisen from women.

  • Got caught up in medieval history, pretty interesting though

25/03/22 09:46:11

• Reading analyse of banking crisis this morning
  • Would like to take the view of how this could have been missed. For instance, the Department of Finance, the IMF nor the OECD raised alarms. There could have been lack of information and malpractice involved. Commisions that were set up to monitor this had a large amount of ‘groupthink’ and insufficient supervision of banks with only 2-3 people assigned per bank.

  • An integrated financial regulator was created in 2003 and placed within the central bank. This structure was the result of an Irish government decision in the late 1990s to consolidate prudential and consumer protection regulation, in response to tax evasion and consumer scandals. The result was the Central Bank and Financial Services Authority of Ireland (CBFSAI), which comprised three decision-making bodies within one legal personality. One of these bodies was the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority (IFSRA), which was responsible for prudential supervision and consumer protection. IFSRA had operational autonomy in the exercise of its statutory functions, but relied on the central banking body for resources and services. This structure gave rise to ambiguous lines of responsibility and to information silos between the prudential and central banking sides, possibly in an attempt to establish their operational independence from one another. The CBFSAI was also affected by a diversity of mandates. By statute, IFSRA was responsible for both the safety and soundness of the financial system and also the promotion and development of the financial sector. This dual mandate had the potential to make the supervisor less effective in its bank-specific supervisory interventions

    • More detail is given then about the groupthink and general malpractice
  • What did this ‘soft landing’ that was supposed to be the outcome look like?
• The beginning of this paper details the Swedish banking crisis and looks at it as similar to Ireland
  • Sweden de regulated banks in the early 80’s
  • max LTV ratios were increased from 70% to 90%
  • Banks make money through interest rates on loans. The more loans they make the more interest they are getting back. People in the economy have more credit. They have more income spare as credit is used for houses and cars and possibly credit cards. This means income increases and consumption increases. This maintains the interest rate payments to banks
  • Sweden eventually reigned it in using 2% of their GDP (which doesn’t seem like a lot). They created two agencies, One to supervise institutions that needed recapitalisation and another to deal with the non performing loans
  • In Ireland throughout the early 2000’s til about 2007 there was a large net migration. Largely from the rest of Europe https://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/releasespublications/documents/population/2007/popmig_2007.pdf
  • 

  • Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) stocks measure the total level of direct investment at a given point in time, usually the end of a quarter or of a year. The outward FDI stock is the value of the resident investors’ equity in and net loans to enterprises in foreign economies. The inward FDI stock is the value of foreign investors’ equity in and net loans to enterprises resident in the reporting economy.

  • Initial, it made sense, as population grew and unemployment lowered. People needed homes and had the money to spend.
  • Demand for housing became shaped by demand as a commodity or appreciable asset. I mean once everyone owns a home, who are you selling too. Rent yields were also falling throughout this increase in prices. What is an indicator for the sense that irish homes are becoming commodities?
• Whats the next question for housing post? Maybe need to start making hypothesis and testing them

26/03/22 15:14:45

• Not feeling it today. Got my Physics done though which is better than nothing.
• Hypothesis: The government can afford to build all the social housing needs
• Hypothesis: The breakeven price in all types of tenant are to expensive for median income
• https://assets.gov.ie/6348/140219142846-5a166a1ec85f4237935fb5c21dd666cb.pdf

  • Medium-term annual demand for housing in Ireland is estimated at between 30-35,000 units. Given current average household size, this is the equivalent of a need to house the population of Galway City every year.

  • BTR [Buy to rent] is a type of private rental investment, where typically, a whole block of apartments is built or bought by a single entity with the intention of leasing all units over the long-term

• Households getting smaller means more demand?
• ”Blockchain is tech trying to solve societal problems” thats rarely good. I think a good heuristic is to consistently evaluate it’s technical aspects, as engineers. Not to analyse or prosesthylise the sociological consequences.

29/03/22 09:55:54

• Meeting for Energy Science (10am):
  • Few graduates that are doing Phd’s in school of Physics
  • Become an Energy Institute affiliate member https://www.energyinst.org/
  • SUSI grant
  • montly meetings

30/03/22 14:35:02

• Computation as a vehicle to understand ourselves.
  • Reading Snow Crash at the moment. It’s earlier Stephenson than Cryptonomicon but maybe there is not too much of a difference. There’s a cool linguistic aspect to the book. An ancient common language that the Bible details in the Babel story. This language is considered an analogy to machine language, there’s all these abstractions on top but the ultimate universal language exists underneath
  • The Bible then became a way to fend off some sort of verbal virus that was around in ancient times. The Bible functioned as a meme, propogating throughout the populace. It was considered less malicious than another virus around the time that as said, was transmitted verbal through some kind of universal language that altered your brain structure.
  • There’s a notion of informational biomass throughout the book. It’s explained I think by this uber billionaire whos saving refugees. It’s compared with the labrynth and the minotaur. Where events are offered up for the, I guess, Americans (or just generally well of West) to feed off of. It constantly needs it. Like Whales eating up Krill. More than that the West eats up the refugees and spits them back out. (not too sure whats here)
  • At one point the common language in our brain structures reminded me of Foundation.

  • Down - down - the results can be followed; and all the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy, until Hari Seldon, and very few men thereafter, could really understand one another … because they did no know one another, and could not understand one another, and dared not trust one another … The savage rapacity [aggressive greed] of man towards man

  • Or it could just be another form of control of the mind and man is still the same (like the Mule)
  • The story contains a magnate or just general dodgy wealthy person that controls the infrastructre of information, just like in Cryptonomicon where the goal is to build this infrastructre. Theres a dependency in the complex networks we build on this infrastructure. Always on the physical properties, There must always be some form of reality? Who maintains the infrastructure ?

03/04/22 14:30:58

• In Austin now, have had a hectic few days. Slowly getting things together.
• I watched a video essay on the green knight. I didn’t really listen to much of it. One thing that got me was that it said the green knight forced you to think about mortality and serious issues. At least, I think I got this thought from this video essay. This is an important point I feel. It’s hard to constantly address issues and pile on top your own mortality without being put into a spin cycle of existential dread but maybe thinking about it in a more optimistic sense can help this. It’s a similar theme in Lord of the Rings. No one wants to do any of this stuff (bringing the ring to mount doom, fighting orcs etc.) but they must to preserve what they have with all it’s ups and downs (wars between each other etc.) through this also you find the commonality and idiocy or pointlessness of things you do in the normal times.
• I’m trying to stay positive over here in my own mind. I think when I went to Greece I kind of had a spiral of negative self talk which made it kind of tortuous. Now, I hope I can be kinder to myself and see the positives in my situation. I hope I can use this time to really focus on things without the influence of home, even just doing my day to day operations with the environment that I’m so familiar with. It might give me a chance to really gauge my interests and look at things objectively (or close to objectively)
• The Americans love cars, holy shit. This place is built for cars, not people. It’s a home of machines, the roads are made for them. It’s probably unfair to pin this solely of Austin here but you kind of have to wonder how the hell you’re gonna transistion to a cleaner environment. Some of these ‘trucks’ are closer to tanks. Funnily enough I find myself wanting to get one just to fit in. I can’t imagine living here and not having one. Even in the suburbs here. It reminded me of Margin Call, which I watched last night. The credit cycles are created by the over extension of the common people, the wants and demands, they do it to themselves, obviously this is a bit too simplistic a view but the general pschology of more and more is such a common trend and rears its head in so many different ways from Shakespeare to margin call

04/04/22 11:44:09

• bit of anxiety today. Just unsure of myself. It comes and goes though. Austin might be a place where the kind of talent and hard work is visible. Work ethic is different here in the States. While there might be the same talent in Dublin, I don’t know how visible it is. Maybe it’s just the change of scenery and better weather that brings that out.
• The energy issue we have is potent over here with just the shear amount of stuff. It’s not like Irealand wouldn’t have the same emissions if you increased our population times 100 but looking face to face at these issues in a more dramatic aspect could be good.
• I really feel there is a sense of moving forward all the time over here, do your job well etc. but not really stopping. Similar to how I would do Physics or whatever not really thinking if it’s the most effective where or right idea or that. There’s a time and a place for grinding it out I suppose but how could you have better heuristics for these things.
• I feel I’m constantly justifying why I’m here in my head. Just trying to redirect that to energy problems and generally learning. The justifying thoughts just aren’t really useful, they just make me feel bad.
• Feeling a lot better after doing jiu-jitsu. It gives me a reason to be here I suppose, like it wouldn’t all just be a waste of time.

05/04/22 20:43:47

• I spent a good two hours wandering about in the heat for stuff I need. My god. thankfully I got a Lyft back.
• jiu-jitsu was good, very light, didn’t really break a sweat. Already feel like I’ve learned a lot about leglocks or at least getting closer to the precipice of knowing what I don’t know.
• Physics was hard this morning. Sometimes when I’m trying to access my system 2 brain, or just thinking deeper I can’t it’s blocked by anxiety and current feelings and that.
• I’m actually liking learning Latin at the moment. It’s tricky I can’t say it’s too absorbing, but the idea of seeing how a language works is kind of cool. Makes you analyse your own language.
• I’m hoping to spend some time thinking about energy stuff. Something about being surrounded by the problem here in America and also the general American spirit of work would go well for innovation in Energy
• My mood definitely fluctuates throughout the day. One common stream I’m getting though is that I am who I am. Which is obvious, but in the sense of I can’t change who I am and against this ‘objective standard’ I’ve created for myself I’m a loser but it’s not real. The distribution is probably normal or gaussian or whatever.

06/04/22 17:42:40

• Need to start putting in work on the Energy Science front or at least be urgent with something.

08/04/22 15:35:44

• I wonder if there
• The shear output of stuff in America, or at least the amount of things you can get. It’s like an outwad expression of the human, evolutionary urge for more of a good thing.
• I mean for clothes and books is good, you have a fairly circular economy, in theory at least. But in areas of food and cars it’s more emphaisised. It’s just uncomfortable. Cars make our lives much easier, the solution isn’t to try and get rid of all these things that make our lives better. The solution might be like Tesla do, just output a shit ton more stuff, stuff that in theory is cleaner and better.
• Reading LOTR and Foromir talks about how the warrior class are appreciated in Gondor. I forgot that a class of job can really be a proxy for sentiment. In terms of how respected or popular it is. In Gondor they had forgotten the idea that war was always close, became ‘soft’. This is a trend in reality as well. In a way that’s a big theme in the LOTR. The obligation to remember what came before, to deal with the current situation, not necessarily so it doesn’t happen again. In a way, it’s assumed that disaster and war will happen over and over.
• I find my thinking is inflenced by a kind of system 1 recollection of a recent thing I’ve seen. I don’t really make an effort to curatea what I consume. So as to not ‘spiral’ because that’s what it is often, it’s a spiral to some other negative self talk feeling. Not to the point of delusion here, just maintaining some semblance of consistent thought throughout the day.
• Had some success today about evaluating dating apps and hopefully setting myself up for success. Particularly that Ali guy on Youtube
• I also found it easier today to except who I am, surrounded by all these types of people here my need to placate to everyone makes me feel that I’m switching all the time but I’m quite comfortable with who I am right now. Also, there’s nothing I could do to change it anyways.

12/04/22 12:52:33

• Trying to figure out what to work on!
• Read a nice thought about energy in a book yesterday. That it is unrealized work. Or that work is just ‘realized’ energy. The ultimate effect of energy is always work. Work is not human centric, atoms do work, anything can do work.
• https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/irelands-unique-promise-for-nuclear?s=w
  • Interesting article on how Ireland could jump a generation when it comes to nuclear. Paving the way for innovation in the field. We can’t make huge global change but we can apply it to our little corner of the globe.

13/04/22 10:44:56

• In the case of Ireland, the country is now the only member of the European Union in which English is the main language not only for business but also for schools and public life. Foreign investors are drawn by that fact. They also see that Ireland is relatively underpopulated, and appears to be receptive to absorbing talented foreign immigrants. Furthermore, Ireland is ruled by mainstream parties and seems largely unaffected by the populism and nativism that are creating problems elsewhere in Europe.

• Listening to a philoshipze this podcast about Kierkegaard. Talking about, sticking to a path. When you determine your values sticking to the path and not constantly questioning yourself. This, of course, is something I can relate too. There’s a kind of perceived logic in constantly questioning myself when maybe the solution is to just be a soldier.

15/04/22 18:52:58

• Texas, unambiguosly load and proud, merit?
• If american’s were a normal distribution, you’re most likely coming in contact with those that are exactly who you think they are, at least the ‘urban american’
• The bible as a scroll; etymology
• Not as much of an oddity.
• Evervault as making life easier, like stripe
• heard on podcast about morphing of the tools we use unknown consequences.
• Energy research as the only problem worth solving. Decision made?
• Golden year, article about bullshit taking over for geniuses to do their best work.
• Maybe finish out these thoughts.

24/04/22 12:05:41

• Something about working for a better home.
• apply for UT austin thing?

26/04/22 22:24:57

• Information as physical through time but not space, interesting thought from a Lex Fridman podcast.
• What would it have been like to never see your reflection? Or to not have pictures of those who had passed on? Think it’s a good example of something that is just so contextually different, that is so embedded in our lives. It may, or may not have a large impact on how we think.
• Splits in Christianity seem to come from just logic, or at least the contextual logic of the people. Just looking at the Gnostics and how they addressed how this ideal form of creator (God) could be a carpenter from Nazareth.

28/04/22 09:28:26

• https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1518869056480157697
  • A scary thought. If censorship moves down layers of the stack.
• https://andersource.dev/2022/04/19/dk-autocorrelation.html
  • ”statistics is an attempt to objectively quantify surprise”
    • Here’s how frequentist statistics approaches this:
      • Translate your initial belief to mathematical assumptions (e.g. independence of random variables)
      • Collect data
      • Calculate how likely it is to randomly get results like those you got, if your assumptions were true If that probability is small - you’re surprised! Promptly adjust beliefs about the world
  • The first plot is X-X. Here, the statistical test use requires independence. X and X are clearly dependent so the statistical tests assumptions conflict with the knowledge we have (assumptions)

  • Statistical tests aren’t (or at least shouldn’t be) arcane formulae that crunch the data and give results we should believe even if they contradict our common sense. Rather, they should complement each other, with common sense guiding the choice of methods and assumptions, and statistical tests fine-tuning and quantifying intuition.

01/05/22 10:03:02

• Shakespeare is Popular, by all accounts because he was popular at the time. He played a large role in people’s lives of times gone past.
• Then, I suppose it’s just a question of aesthetics. Like, a movie or any other piece of art, if you don’t like it fair enough. For instance, I think my logic is that: Ok, so the Lion King is based on Hamlet, I gravitate towards the Lion King so this is some fundamental story or narrative or is it just a made up story? If it’s the second (which it is by definition) then why do we appreciate it, why does that one remain? There are certain attributes of it that express things which in turn might be why you’d propagate it, because you, too, want to express those things in your art.
• Also, “If Shakespeare could not find a word to fit his meaning, he invented one. Radiance, zany, lonely, laughable, eyeball, assassination, alligator, obscene, advertising, and more than 1,500 hundred other words we use today were all coined by Shakespeare.”

04/05/22 15:10:22

• Recap of these
  • Texas, unambiguosly load and proud, merit?
    • I think this goes for anywhere really, being proud of where you’re from. I think, like most things, the americans are loud about it. It’s more a question of being loud about what you’re proud of, unashamed I guess. I think there’s merit to that.
  • If american’s were a normal distribution, you’re most likely coming in contact with those that are exactly who you think they are
    • This isn’t exactly a scientific statement it’s just something kind of surprising and anecdotally I see it to be true. The main oddity is the lack of self-awareness. It’s almost like I expect them to be conscious of themselves as I should be conscious about my own culture. Like anywhere, this is present in some people and not in others. And also in various aspects.
  • Not as much of an oddity.
    • This is about me I guess. This definitely ebbs and flows like anything but I don’t feel as ashamed of who I am most days. Even some things I’m not great at I’m finding I can accept them and be OK with them in their uniqueness. I mean now that I’ve had sex (well, not quite) or been intimate it doesn’t really change me at all. It’s all still there. That should scare me but it doesn’t. It just means that it’s part of me. “No one is better than me, I am better than nobody else, be the best you, you can be.” Remind yourself of young you, in your innocence, think of how much you accept that person
  • Evervault as making life easier, like stripe
    • Leverage, the technological lever, economic productivity, whatever you wanna call it just in software. That’s pretty much what software is. Hope do we increase productivity for a task. How do we offer that as a product.
• From article on Sri Lankan organic farming crisis
  • This is because fertilizer and other agricultural chemicals have substituted human labor, liberating enormous populations from needing to dedicate most of their lifetime labor to growing food.

  • For most of recorded human history, the primary way humans increased agricultural production was by adding land to the system, which expanded the amount of solar radiation and soil nutrients available for food production. Human populations were relatively small, under 1 billion people in total, and there was no shortage of arable land to expand onto. For this reason, the vast majority of anthropogenic changes in global land use and deforestation has been the result of agricultural extensification—the process of converting forests and prairie to cropland and pasture. Against popular notions that preindustrial agriculture existed in greater harmony with nature, three-quarters of total global deforestation occurred before the industrial revolution. Even so, feeding ourselves required directing virtually all human labor to food production. As recently as 200 years ago, more than 90 percent of the global population labored in agriculture. The only way to bring additional energy and nutrients into the system to increase production was to let land lie fallow, rotate crops, use cover crops, or add manure from livestock that either shared the land with the crops or grazed nearby. In almost every case, these practices required additional land and put caps on yields.

06/05/22 14:13:44

• Andrew Huberman on Jocko’s podcast, talking about natural responses to a large spike in dopamine. So say, if you have coffee and music at the gym, the next time you go without those things your dopamine is below your baseline. The way to get it up is just to push through rather than go into a negative feedback loop of trying to get those things again. This is probably the same with me and studying.
  • Stacking dopamine is dangerous. This is like when I eat food and need Youtube or something to compliment it.
  • ”Pleasure without effort is absolutely deadly”

09/05/22 18:35:58

• Reading LBJ bio from Caro. Man, some tough lives moving out to the frontier for both men and women, the loneliness, the threat of violence, lack of hope it’s mad how it can all be fueled by human ambition
• I think Austin is a great example of something from nothing, creating an environment for human’s where in theory (of the time) it should not exist.

10/05/22 14:40:27

• I’ve started reading ‘Modern Ireland’ again. Trying to take a more nuanced viewpoint. There’s just so much detail in the 17th century alone. My spotlight is a bit wide and just bouncing around. I’m trying to take the viewpoint of the common man (or woman). I briefly started reading History of Christianity just to try and understand how particulars of scriptures had such a dramatic effect. I’m just finding it particularly difficult to understand.
• I read an interesting summary that detailed the beginning of the 16th century in England as starting to have access to a more personal bible. One that was also more ‘accurate’ as a large amount of scriptures were (found?) and translated or at least the originals could be checked for more accuracy.
• It’s very hard to read without a goal in mind. What context am I building up?
• I’m mainly trying to understand what life might have been like as a catholic in 15/16th century Ireland. What was the level of oppression.
• There’s no real straight cause effect line for most events. It branches. Each event may have several different reasons. Obviously, this is not unique but if my ultimate goal is to finally conjure up some complete history of Ireland in my head I’m afraid it’s hopeless. Once again, I’m back again to the questions I want answered.
• There’s a search too, for the facts. I think thats why I might be drawn to the economic history of it all. To be able to use the axioms and judge theories on that. Way too formal obviously.

11/05/22 16:19:47

• How does proving properties of prime numbers apply to the real world? Well, it doesn’t but how do we relate what we’re proving in number theory to the foundations of our thinking, as seems to be done with computation. I suppose, logic and proof writing is a formalisation of our reasoning. Anything that can’t be proved with this formalisation is a limit to our reasoning.

20/05/22 09:14:18

• Writing first thing might be something useful to do. Even before Physics and that.
• On Maths, I’ve been reading through the book on how to write a proof. Interesting stuff struggling with excercises, partly because they’re boring and partly because I can’t do them. The main area of confusion at the moment is the conditional law. Just getting familiar with applying it and seeing it in statements. This along with general negation, recognising how flipping a statement around or negating it can mean the same thing as the original positive statement. A matter of slow careful practice I suppose.
• I’ve struggled a bit in the last day or two since I got back with focus. Theres a lacking inner strength o do the right work. I think part of it stems from me wanting to move on from Austin. I’m not really too sure why I’m so anxious to leave. It’s only about 4 more weeks until I’m flying home, it’s not really a long time but for some reason I want it to speed up. I might try and look at my short term goals, maybe make them more tangible so I can make the 4 weeks a bit easier, especially the next two weeks. One goal for instance is to read the Teddy Roosevelt book. But the goal might be more tangible if it’s 50 pages a day or something. I’m also trying to finish chpt. 5 of my Calculus book by the end of May.
• In Physics I’m moving on to the Thermodynamics chapters just to make sure I have them covered. Once again, I struggled yesterday getting in to them, goals here would be useful. I’m going to aim to do a chapter every 3 weeks. So getting one chapter done until I get home is the goal I suppose.
• Match tracker, the bain of my existence. Haven’t looked at it in months. Will try and add the ability for subs before I leave.
• I’m torn too about when to leave. I have it planned out I’m pretty sure until I get to New York. I’m just not too sure of when the flight out should be as I’m not too sure who from the family is around and that.
• I’m feeling more anxious than usual, a bit stressed as well for some reason. I think I need to get a bit more sleep.

23/05/22 17:37:31

• https://shuvomoy.github.io/blogs/posts/Knuth-on-work-habits-and-problem-solving-and-happiness/

• When I finally do get into batch mode, I go very carefully through the first two or three papers, trying to work the concepts out in my own mind and to anticipate what the authors are going to say before turning each page. I usually fail to guess what the next page holds, but the fact that I’ve tried and failed makes me more ready to understand why the authors chose the paths that they did. Frequently I’ll also write little computer programs at this point, so that the ideas solidify in my head. Then, once I’ve gone slowly through the first few papers that I’ve accumulated about some topic, I can usually breeze through the others at a comparatively high speed. It’s like the process of starting with baby steps and progressing to giant steps that I described earlier.”

• From watching Normal People. It’s fascinating how much what other people think affect us. I definitely relate to Connell in the sense of being ashamed of who I was with. It’s such a horrible thing to do to someone (although I haven’t really done it) but it’s so hard to overcome the notion of what others would think. There’s an ego within oneself attached. As if, those whose opinions matter to you actually should matter.
• Learning about heat in Physics. I never really looked at heat as just a transfer of energy. It’s only artifact being that of a change in temperature, not actually being withing the body. Similar to kinetic energy, actually, in this case the transfer has no name but temperature could be compared to equations of kinetic energy. In this sense it’s easy to see how universal heat is. If it’s just a jostling of atoms and their transfer of energy. It’s everywhere.
• I’m inspired by TR these days. Just his relentless work ethic. Both in the sense, that I’m just not him, never will be. But also that even attaining 20 percent of what he does would be considered hard work. He just had boundless energy. Also, he didn’t care what others thought of him, very eccentric guy. What person that has affect is conventional, I mean seriously. Or at least if not conventional just at least free thinking in some sense.
• Also, struck by something Knuth says in the above article. That happiness is .8. Meaning that attaining 100% is not maintainable. That if you can get 80% in terms of comfort, that’s what it is. I can kind of relate to this in my thinking about enjoying ‘the moment’ that all the anxiety and stresses clashing with what beauty might be there are all part of the moment. It’s not realistic to have pure happiness all the time.

26/05/22 18:01:19

• Ok, so in a shocking turn of events I’ve made the same mistake that’s cost me thousands of hours throughout my life.
• It’s hard to accept that the time I’ve wasted is nobody’s fault but my own, completely avoidable. There’s no real use in dwelling on it but trying to get better means using time more efficiently. I like the PC thing of having a clock counting down. Just in terms of the small pockets of time in the day could be filled with productive things, didn’t do too bad a job of it today
• I though a bit about why I have this sudden self pity or something for myself if I spend the evening or my free time say researching random, like housing or anything like that. I immediately turn it into a grind of some sort. At times it is, but at times I do really like just finding out about the world, separating the map from the territory, I don’t feel like I allow myself to embrace this part, because it’s supposed to be boring. Dwelling in something that satisfies curiosity rather than being explicitly useful is something that all people do. God knows I’ve wasted so much time in my life in way less useful ways.
• Normal People is a great show, especially episode 11. It’s a bit on the nose this time around I think, just in terms of the exaggeration of some parts but it’s probably necessary to keep it moving. I suppose you could criticise it as a show portraying love that maybe a large majority of the populace may never get. It’s interesting though how it portrays communication and generally implicit feelings. The external artifact of some underlying feeling that either you’re not aware of or just don’t feel comfortable expressing is everywhere. I think the ‘perfect’ relationship they’ve found is someone they’re completely vulnerable with. Maybe that’s the ultimate goal of life even.
• I watched the season finale of Atlanta yesterday. The season in general is more of a collection of short stories with recurring characters. Which is fine. They really take advantage, or use, absurdity. Just generally out of the ordinary things that when you’re viewing it seem totally in congruent. Maybe at times it’s a metaphor but in general it kind of goes against any sense of narrative structure or just logic. I don’t really see the point of it. In the case of the ‘Trini to the bone’ episode where a young boy whose nanny is Trinidadian becomes culturally Trinidadian. The same idea is explored in what makes someone black. Just kind of listing what the culture is, like a list of items. The absurd sense is just seeing a kid do all this odd shit but it’s more of just a twist or some odd example of an interesting idea. In the sense that anyone can be molded by culture, there is fundamentally nothing different between black and white in terms of how we respond to our upbringing. I feel like TR in expectation that someone will read these but the previous summation isn’t an attempt to define the episode, just a theme I thought about watching it.
• I think sometimes Atlanta is trying to create some aesthetic of the black experience. Trying to inhabit as some neutral observer ‘the black experience in America’.

29/05/22 17:56:59

• Reading ‘The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt’ has given me respect for Biographies in the sense of how useful they can be in enriching thoughts on people. I guess I always viewed reading a biography as an inherent admiration or reverence for the person, that you wanted to ‘learn how to be them’. This just isn’t the case. TR is such a weird character and it’s interesting to see the life of some who is a sample size of 1. The contradictions in his character, his idiosyncrasies make me feel more comfortable about my own. It’s also funny, the comments that TR has on people at times are just hilarious. The higher class men of that time in politics seem so different than what’s there now. There was still corruption though no matter how educated the political class. It’s so mad to see the defects in moral character of people so ‘mentally superior’ a bit like why Newton was such a head case when he was clearly able to grasp reality at such a high level.
• The sheer work of TR too is making me wince at home little I do. This man is constantly churning out articles and books. Henry Adams described him as “[having] that singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter-the quality that medieval theology assigned to God-he was pure act”

30/05/22 14:56:43

• Generally feeling fairly good today, although I literally just read an article about a violent crime that put me in a bad mood.
• I feel like having goals that are no more than a week or max 2 weeks out is good for me. I feel capable of working hard at the moment, especially in the morning because I’ve only a couple of days doing it.
• I’m not too sure whether I should fly or tag along for a lift to New Orleans, it’s a bit more inconvenient going with the lift.
• I know that the past is dominated by white men. And the general attitude of Jingoism or nationalism or whatever is not really very ‘modern’ but it seems independent of this to judge great people. Great people are determined by action in circumstance. That doesn’t make them immune to criticism, or that finding a fault with them should be impossible but the counter of saying it’s all fault is absurd. Specifically on my mind is TR, the things he does in the environment he’s in are exceptional in the sense that not many people would have done them and a lot of time they are for an admirable goal. There is a line of course, like the debate about whether Genghis Khan is a great man or whatever but it seems fairly relevant to the current thinking on past politicians especially British and American.

31/05/22 18:42:55

• I watched some talks from Peter Zeihan today. His takes on energy seem interesting and I think I should pay attention. Also, he talks of deglobalisation, not too sure what that really means.

01/06/22 11:09:34

• I’m really anxious and stressed today. Not very consciously but I can feel it. My Maths and Physics study wasn’t too great this morning. And I’m not too sure what decision to make for next week going to New Orleans. If money wasn’t an issue I still think I’d stick to my plan. But if I had never booked the tickets and accomdation I wouldn’t. It’s annoying that this is causing me this much anxiety about a very simple decision. What would make me choose one way or the other? The extra day in Austin I’d prefer not to do. The extra day in N.O. Im not too crazy about either! The hassle of getting a flight. Lets try sort this out just to get it out of my head. Ok, so if we stop off at places in Louisiana I’ll go by car, if not I’ll go by plane.
• I’m also anxious about money and I don’t have enough food in the house. I can see that I have budget for about 50 dollars a day so there’s no real reason to be bothered about it. I just end up eating a lot of small things.

02/06/22 15:02:02

• Another thing from Zeihan today. Nato saw the ability of Russia is combat. They realised that they would demolish them in ground combat so the fear is that Russia would immediately resort to a Nuclear option if any combat between the US started as they would realise they’re severly outmatched.
  • He see’s the demographic collapse of Russia -in that there are less of each generations to protect the corridors (9 of them) ‘into’ Russia as- an existential crisis for Russia, he believes Russia are interpreting this correctly.
  • He also highlights that we can’t have the ‘Green transistion’ without the Russians due to them being one of the largest supplier globally of certain raw materials like copper.
  • This is where talks about changing the one messy supply chain of oil from Iran and Russia with 11 more for all the metals required for Green tech
  • And they’re the biggest supplier of fertilizer
  • Demographic collapse as due to the ability (through globalisation) for many countries to industrialise, move to city, specialise etc.
  • Boomers leaving labour market
  • He predicts halving of China populatin by 2050
  • Having a strong workforce seems to be vital, that sounds stupid, I wonder how productive we are as a generation.

03/06/22 23:15:55

• Is it genocide or civilising? I think it’s pretty obvious it’s genocide but I do think that at the time say of marching against the frontier in the West there was a notion of making life ultimately better for those people. I suppose it’s then about intent. For instance, I don’t think Cromwell had good intentions. It’s a tricky one to navigate but I think it’s something that is up for debate in terms of to what level we should admire or try to learn from such escapades.
• Today is my last day in Austin.
• Some highlights from the TR book is warranted

  • p.93 “Triumph was worth the ink; tragedy was not” I found it interesting how he wrote in his private diaries as if they would be read in the future (a bit like me)

  • p.124 wanting to be part of the ‘governing class’ or why he enters politics “I intended to be part of the governing class”

  • p.155 Roosevelt was trying to push through a bill for a monopoly of some railroad company on construction of some part of the railroad. At the time, politicians would black mail corporations saying that if they wanted a bill (like this one passed) they would have to pay. They wished to be paid not to pass them. Roosevelt wanted to pass this bill fairly. “There was a broken chair in the room, and I got a leg of it loose and put it down beside me where it was not visible… I moved that the bill be reported favourably…This almost precipitated a riot”

  • p.207 story about a wolf scaring horses why the slept in the dirt “By Godfrey, but this is fun!“

  • p.250 cabot lodge

  • Stories about breaking his face chasing fox and taking prisoners up a frozen river.

  • p.405 introduction to ‘reform’

  • p.466 how appalled he is a injustice at indian reservations

  • p.477 further opinions on the frontier

  • p.637

  • p.708 calling the ‘Jew’ ‘Pork Chop’

  • He always used publicity to add accountability to any discussion he had with those who preferred things ‘behind closed doors’

20/06/22 13:54:40

• Goal for today is understand the Irish macroeconomic profile. Or why we can’t afford housing and need private investment.
  • What is the role of the private bank in society?
  • It supplies credit for expansion of productive activities. In theory then it’s a way to increase production in society, hopefully production of things people want and need.
  • It’s a place to store your money
  • How do banks ‘hold up’ a modern economy?
• The way banks lend money to one another, when Lehman collapsed, seized up. How does bank lending to each other work?
• Irish banks got access to ‘deposits’ from around the world, not just their own through money markets (whatever they are)
• Irish banks couldn’t create money in the usual way because they were on the euro right?
• So they make loans with this foreign money, this foreign money is shorter term so they need more and more to keep paying it back. Once it dries up they have however much they long term loan to the public to pay back.

21/06/22 11:08:59

• If I pay 4500 for half the masters at the start of the year. I have about 1500 left for rent and living. How long would it take me to pay the second half of the masters?
• Is there a list of companies that I could apply to?
• Need to prepare CV

22/06/22 14:17:18

• The Monetary System
  • Banks create money in fractional reserve banking by essentially owing money to too people, the person that gave them the money and however much they are loaning out (as that person too, is owed the money if requested in full)
  • “Creates money but not wealth”

23/06/22 14:04:08

• The ultimate goal for an economy I suppose is to improve the standard of living of everybody. So, that’s the base.
  • From that you need a way to evaluate how an economy is doing, what metric can you use.
  • The most intuitive for me, I think, is income. In the sense that I can buy more bread, have access to more of what I need. You can spin this another way, in that, more bread is being produced. So if bread is x amount at a given time and then later its x/2 that means I can buy 2 times as much bread with the same amount of money. My wealth has increased. You could also view it that my income has doubled. Whatever I needed I can now buy twice of due to increases in production. This is because of scarcity. The price is not going to decrease for bread unless the amount of it increases. Or the amount of demand decreases. So assuming no natural disasters or genocide it won’t decrease.
  • When is enough? Why do rich countries need to keep growing productivity? do we assume it’s making peoples lives better?
• What other goals could there be?

27/06/22 16:58:55

• I think I need to start working on my ‘portfolio’ whatever that is.
• I spent most of today, with varied success, reading about housing. I’m starting to get a better picture I think. I’m not too sure how much I like my opinion about why governments are not more involved. I think the hardest fact is that they don’t have the budget to do it. Then my second thought is that they’re a government and they wouldn’t be able to do it as effeciently as a private company.
• What am I focusing on these days, there’s no end products to any activities I’m doing, at least nothing polished or useful, it’s a bit frustrating. I’ll try and read tonight, but what and for what purpose, what context am I building? Maybe, now is the time to do something, along with the Thermodynamics I’m learning?

28/06/22 11:32:26

• How might a justification of why you’d hire me go?
• Also, should I continue my article on ‘How we know what we know?’, ‘How we reason about things we can’t see’

29/06/22 13:48:08

• I think one of the issues with match-tracker is we didn’t rigourously define functionality. For instance, now I’m looking at making subs. Is this an event? It’s another decision on the fly.

30/06/22 14:50:14

• reading Scott Alexander article about spike in homicide rates
  • According to FBI in 2020 2,871 incidents of African Americans was due to anti black hate crime with a really small amount being murder. Like, negligible it seems. So it doesn’t seem that any spike in murder with black people could causally be linked purely to hate crimes.
  • 
  • Alexander says this may be because police specifically pulled back in black communities
• From this article Salesforce trades at 5 times revenue. Which is deemed slightly healthy. WDAY revenue in 2021 was 4.3 billion with a 20% change to 5.1 billion in 2022, so the growth aspect might be slightly different with Workday but still, it’s market cap is 35.45B which is about 7 times revenue.

04/07/22 08:07:10

• Day 1 of me trying to write more frequently, again. The aim here is to just let things out, first thing in the morning.
• Something on my mind the last couple of weeks have been, ‘being the best me I possibly can be’ from that Jocko speech about growth. It’s powerful I think and it’s something I think I’ve been having a good go at living up to in the past, but over the last few weeks, not so much.
• Physics has been really hard to knuckle down on. I think in my minds eye of all the problems (excercises) I’ve to solve and I get disheartened. I don’t know if there is a remedy to this apart from pushing through and creating weekly goals.
• I’m afraid, sometimes, to visualise the concepts in my head because I know they’ll come with some gap in knowledge which takes effort to fill. The real engagement comes when you do that though.
• My lack of reading too, is getting to me. I don’t seem to have the attention to get invested in books as much, especially not the non-fiction.

05/07/22 08:04:32

• Had a football match last night, first one in a while. Could have done a lot more but all in all went well. Scored some frees that were important.
• I’ve been listening to Tim Kennedy on the Jocko podcast, he’s an amazing dude. One thing that I think attracts me is the kind of Teddy Roosevelt intellectual with that kind of ability for hardship, or knowledge of what it is, what it’s like. I kind of look at all these army lads that are in the public eye (well, some of them) as like that. I think that’s why I want to read books like ‘War’ and that. I want to be in touch with the animal nature of the world. To further understand what we have and how it must be consistently worked on and fought for, both physically and mentally.
• Things were rushing through my head last night about the match, what I said, what I did, what I should have done. It was much easier push them aside though, I feel I dwelled on them less. I think it honestly didn’t affect me as much, which I’m happy with. Hopefully all that continues.
• Read some good articles this morning about writing. Stating hypothesis of something you think is important if true and then delving into them. I think with ‘War’ my overarching question is ‘are humans inherently violent’ of course, this has to have a lot more nuance. My initial reaction is that we’re evolutionarily violent, as in it’s a means to some evolutionary end. We have an extra ability for evil though which is unique to us. The knowledge that we know what we are doing is wrong, the self-awareness creates another dimension to evil. Understanding how states are build on War and how they can be maintained without it I think is important. Often, a stable equilibrium is reached without it necessarily being the most optimal.

06/07/22 09:34:32

• I listened to Huberman talk about Fridman yesterday on Europe, how Fridman approaches things with love, it made me think about how I’m currently approaching things, with a sense of obligation, not with a sense of wonder that started me on the path. It’s hard to always see things this way but I think approaching things with love is a good way of summing it up. A point to short Youtube vids for not being a waste of time

12/07/22 15:57:32

• Tooze on paying for the war on terror

  • The really big spenders, up to that point in history, were war-mongers not socialists. Support for disarmament and peace went hand in hand with austerity… . Even more dangerous is the possibility that by advocating austerity in a good cause, you leave the power of expansive economics to the bad guys.

  • This is present today in the ‘degrowth’ nature of the climate change idealists.
• Read a good article this morning from Tooze aswell on the make up of inflation, a large portion of it being from corporate profits, what does this mean for the money printing aspect of inflation?
• Tooze details how a political theory bend get’s added as wage reconstruction or negotiation may take place changing the dynamics of corporations and labour
• What areas of Physics do I find interesting right now? What are tangents I would like to go on?

08/08/22 15:39:33

• Finally the question I’m wondering about

  • The basic assumption to be made for this result is that our “intuitive” notion of computability can be formally defined as Turing computability and so that there are no “computable” problems that are not Turing computable. But what was Turing’s “intuitive” notion of computability and how can we be sure that it really covers all computable problems, and, more generally, all kinds of computations? This is a very basic question in the philosophy of computer science.

12/08/22 15:14:39

• I’ve been looking at the energy profile of the EU. Ireland is a large consumer of natural gas. All our gas comes from the UK which seems to come from a pipeline through Scotland. I suppose, it doesn’t really matter what pipeline in comes in through, it’s about where it’s produced. The UK and Norway used to be large producers of oil from the North Sea, for some reason they’ve cut back.
• Ok, now i’m into how the oil market works. The Spot prices for Asian LNG spiked around the invasion of the roomate.
  • Globally there are 3 benchmark oils because generally a barrell of oil has various properties in terms of light and heavy or content of sulfur. Barrels are priced relative to the benchmark oil. This is done through futures contracts which specify the amount and destination of the oil. These futures are traded on a mercantile exchange.
  • Refineries seem to be operating at capacity, in that they literally can’t supply more oil.

14/08/22 10:34:51

• yesterday, it seemed they got ‘ignition’ for the first time with nuclear fusion. It seems like nuclear fusion is becoming more and more feasible. It got me thinking about what happens if we just magically had a carbon free primary energy source, selfishly, what would that mean for me and my pursuit of energy science?
  • The conversion, I think there would be a large change in machines. For instance, what would happen to the car industry. It would have to change to electric cars, improvements in their effeciency would be needed but with the source of electricity being clean (and, presumably cheap) they would clearly become the better option, not reliant at all on oil markets.
  • Innovation, is the source of energy problem then just solved? We still have a waste problem, I mean we still have problems. But, things could be radically shifted to electric.
  • Nuclear fuels are incredibly dense.
  • Other useful skills, I think even if the energy problem is ‘solved’ when or during my degree. I still will have learned a lot more Science and hopefully generally more about the world. It won’t be a complete waste of time.
  • Isaac Arthur video on this
    • Interesting point about power vs energy. He talks about compact reactors as those with high power outputs that could say, be used as thrust for a rocket. Energy is the total work it would be able to do, which in the case of nuclear is very high, but in terms of how fast we can make it do that work, is not yet known, whats the power density of our current nuclear reactors?

15/08/22 13:27:02

• From the SEAI, the average home used 20,955 kWh energy.
• Before I go for a walk
  • The rise in UK energy prices (residential specifically) seem largely due to wholesale gas prices
  • Gas prices are reliant on oil prices for transport
  • 
  • I’m currently trying to figure out why oil prices are rising, so far, from the NYT article that graph is taken from (an MIT economist) says that oil producers are wary of increasing production due to renewables coming on board possibly and also an expected crash in oil prices (don’t know how that logic holds) maybe if they produce enough to meet demand they don’t want it to return to what it was before covid. This could also be why energy companies are making larger profits in that less investment is put into meeting further demand but put into dividends and paying investors.
• Listeing to Adam Tooze podcast on my walk. He talks about how inelastic supply of oil is. That Saudi produces aren’t ramping up (not too sure why, he mentions trad offs with other governemnt related spending) and also discusses wall St. trying to get big fossil fuel companies in line in terms of profit margins reducing there output as this seems to be the general outlook for the US government which tooze says will be spending something like 80 billion a year for the next ten years which is about 3 times what was allocated the last decade on ‘green energy’.
• Looking a the NYT article again, the price of oil is now below 100 so it doesn’t really seem like the increase in gas prices (that’s still going on) can be so directly attribtuted to it. So the rise in gas prices could be more correlated with gas pipelines from Russia (as in, the US will see less of an effect)

16/08/22 12:50:02

• Watching Tiago Forte talk on ‘second brain’
  • One thing I struggle with here is how to reliably link things. Maybe its worth classifying by interest, in terms of a folder stucture.
  • Intersting note from Tiago, get yourself to be more selective and picky about what you are noting down.
  • He states the end goal should be to express using the information you’re getting, it might be something actionable in your life, a blog post, a change in thinking on a major project etc.
• Listening to Tooze this morning on a few things, particularly on the use case for housing as a speculative asset

17/08/22 19:25:18

• Slavoj zizek guide to ideology
  • Watching the first hour of this today. Zizek talks about ideology as wrapping basic human emotional responses or needs. He talks about the rock band Rammstein playing on the basic ‘work party’ notions of unity and ‘rising up’ without the added ideology of the fascist, Nazi party. How doing this is better as it reveals it for what it truly is. This reminded me of ‘proximate mechanisms’ from Gat’s War the notion of emotional gratification evolving from somatic needs.
  • One interesting portions is the discussion around taxi driver. The motif of a girl that you like and want to protect, in the case of Taxi Driver I think she’s a prostitute and he wants to make her ok I suppose because deep down he wonders if she wants it this way. If he goes in there and takes her out, will that be truly what she wants. He touches on this with riots in London and looting, while there are objective differences that could be helped (more functioning communitites) is there a common reaction, or ideology wrapped response underlying it. I don’t really know what he’s trying to get at with this particular portion.
    • About this Zizek says, these people are caught in the predominant ideology but have no way to realise what this ideology demands of them. An acting out in the consumerism space
    • ”Even the most brutal outburst of violence is an enactment of an internal deadlock”
    • An outburst due to a lack of ‘cognitive mapping’ he makes a similar point about trying to shove all our problems into one enemy like in jaws because we can’t process all thats wrong in the world.
  • Interesting enough though. To be honest, I think it’s along the lines of my thinking about the culture of capatilism as being the problem, or I suppose, in this case, the ideology.

18/08/22 14:17:27

• A few things have been on my mind recently about Energy Science and generally, ‘solving the energy problem’.
  • 1. If we suddenly had nuclear fusion, would all our dreams become a reality?
    • Straight off the bat, power density matters. If we have fusion but now engine to power, say, a rocket into orbit, we’ll still need to use fossil fuels for that. One thing that could be done though would be to work on batteries so you could build up electric energy and develop power that way. I don’t think that’s physically impossible we just can’t do it at the moment.
  • 2. Is there an ‘end goal’ for energy, when all our problems will be solved?
    • The ‘end goal’ is cheap and reliable access to renewable energy that emit extremely low GHG emissions.
  • 3. Does ‘climate change’ deserve the urgency it has, and even more?
    • I mean, what is the argument for ‘climate change’ what scientific methods are being used to make these estimates?
      • The earths temperature is rising, along with the CO2 emissions we’re emitting.
      • particurlarly extrapolating back to ice ages. Apparentely they use archives (which could be fossils or layers of rock etc.) they measure the chemical composition of these and can tell their age either through layers on the archive or carbon dating.
  • Also, taking the lense of me going into Trinity, what am I hoping to get out of going there?
    • Possibly access to literature or history classes, like the classics or something
    • Access to faculty in areas of interest. Areas of interest that may only develop after about 2/3 months

22/08/22 13:32:56

• I’m trying to figure out a plan for training. I really feel whats important is having metrics of progress, like tests or stats or whatever. My general goals would be
  • Increased speed, faster footwork specifically
  • Increased mobility
  • Increased strength/weight ratio
    • This also comes with increased muscle endurance.
  • A diet that I’m confident I’m getting my protein requirements with
• This is coming of the back of me not really changing that much, body composition wise for the last 3 years. It would be nice to not have weight and general appearance as some sort of metric. All of the above would point to generally trying to lean up a bit.
• It looks like to increase aerobic capacity, like below 70% heart rate you do long sessions, like a long run, or bike ride.
• Then for the anerobic, it’s more done in short burst before what you’re training for.

23/08/22 12:41:46

• Study isn’t going too well, in that I don’t see any progress, both nominally and real. Of course there is some progress there but each question stumps me a bit. One issue in particular is units and in general getting familiar with physicial measurements of things. The creation of standard of measurements and proportions.
• You know maps? how to navigate around the world on a boat involves knowing about esoteric modes of navigation like nauts, longitude, latitude. These measurements aren’t the same as guiding yourself about a flat surface because 1) the terrain is windy and 2) the terrain is not flat. I assume sailors can visualise this terrain somewhat in their heads but not like to quick comfort of something flat. Things in our locality make sense, what we can grasp visually. Sometimes I think physics is a grasping of terrain. waiting for its rules, to tell use how to go here, or there. If you think of the properties of gases. Just the same way we think of a boat as being at certain coordinates, going at a certain speed, we describe the state of a gas with a set of physical properties too. If you move here and there on a boat, your speed might change, also your coordinates change based on where you are on the globe. The globe is the ultimate determination of these measurements we’ve come up with. If we move around in our ‘gas boat’ or ‘state’ our properties of location or existence change too. Also, according to the Earth but fundamentally according to the universe too. If you were in a boat, you might notice that if you go a certain direction you’re sweeped with currents down a great distance. The measurements of your x and y would have to be changed to account for this. The same way our ‘gas boat’ with a slight nudge in a certain direction is messed about the place however the universe sees it. In a way to universe is kind of one big ocean of ‘terrain’ that affects all things we do. It determines the relationship between those properties we made up to accurately define our place in the universe (literally).
  • I think this slowly gets to what I find interesting about looking at all the graphs you’ve to look at and all the measurements to contemplate with the gases.

25/08/22 12:16:59

• On run this morning listening to Bret Hall. He talks about, in the ‘Reality of Abstractions’ that mathematics is not ultimate truth, that proofs arent ultimate truths, will have to dig into it more. It vibes with the notions of what we consider reality, in terms of reality vs ‘physical’ things. Which one is real and which is not, is there a difference in them

• I Also came across Kevin Zhou online, this physics grad student who has loads of notes (a bit over my head) on his website. It’s interesting to me though that as a clearly talented student, as well as an intense interest in Science there is close to 2000 pages of notes! It really sets the bar high in terms of learning and understanding things. It’s kind of inspirational to know that much effort is being put in by someone like him to learn this stuff.

• Writing out notes on the computer too is not my most favourite but it forces some element of clarity in thinking. There a strictness to what can be put down that (may) helps understanding or at least clarifies it somewhat.

26/08/22 16:53:20

• The base of the workout goals is building aerobic base, so ook over 3 months and see if theres a difference. It’s showwn to improve five k times as well so that could be another metric. How often should I do it? Supplement to all other training. Honestly this is something that I’ve really been missing. I’ve been going pure anerobic. 3-4 days a week. 1hr ideally.
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z82GCNXdLAA. Vo2 max coordinated with longevity. Can do a zone 5 after zone 2. Got to be consistent in zone 2.
  • https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1rSl6Pd49Ileo7ledwkOHgERH4sZHTsi
    • This is the main framework I’ll use I think just because this guy trains high level athletes.
    • Broken down into three periods
    • 1. getting ready for something more intense
      • This stage is building a base 55-80% range for weights about 24-100 reps weekly for each primary movement; 1-3 sessions a week
      • This also includes alactiv sessions, sprinting, jumping, throwing to get one reps of max output. About quality of output. Want to go on to be able to repeat these tings. Alactic power
    • 2. picking it up
      • 1-2 sessions a week weights 70-90% range for weights 12-48 reps for each excercise.
      • mimic movements e.g. jumps(clapping push ups) Alactic capacity. 3-6 secs work
    • I think that’s enough for today, I’m hoping tomorrow I can look at what mobility goals I could look at setting up.

27/08/22 14:34:15

• Andrew Huberman, Andy Galpin
  • 9 main adaptions you get from training. Speed, strength, skill, power, hypertrophy, muscular endurance, energy endurance (produce and sustain work), anerobic power, V02 max, how long can you sustain work.
  • Whichever you’re trying to improve at, you must have some element of progressive over load
  • Modifiable variables for adaptation
    • Excercise choice
      • The excercise does not determine adaptation, it’s how you use it (i.e. reps ranges, sets). Some choices obviously not great like bicep curls for power
      • What muscles you wanna use lead you to the excercise choice.
    • Intensity
      • percentage of one rep max, or percentage of heart rate
    • Volume
      • Sets x reps
    • Rest interval
    • Progression
    • Frequency
  • Strength
    • Excercise choice: In general, full range of motion, choice excercies with full range of motion, press (horizontal and vertical), hinge of some sort (like deadlift)
    • Intensity
      • Challenge the muscle to produce more total force.
      • Above 85% of one rep max. Enforces a low rep range
      • warmup: set of 10 at 50%, set of 8 at 60%, 8 at 70%, 5 at 75%
      • Primary driver is intensity, so we need to have a high rest. 2-4 min, can do with superset of another strength excercise. No cardiovascular gain here, if you did a circuit you’d lose some of the intensity but gain that cardiovascular aspect
      • 3 to 5 concepts. 3-5 excercies, 3-5 reps, 3-5 sets, 3-5 min rest, 3-5 times a week
      • Power you’re looking more towards the velocity end of spectrum, so need to go a small bit lighter.
  • Hypertrophy
    • Intensity is not the primary source of adaption here.
    • (around the 50 minute mark)areas affecting muscle force produced: nervous system, muscle contraction, some sort of connective tissue, changes happen at all three of those levels
    • Changing muscle size, does not guarantee you produce more force They may have not changed the areas above.
    • If you want to allow that process of ‘contractile proteins’ to grow, you’ve got to rest, this is why sometimes people can do a lot of strength training as opposed to more rest days in between for hypertrophy training.
    • About 72 hours rest
    • Frequency is not wholly important as long as you hit the required volume, so if you don’t space it out you might have one pretty long hard workout.
    • Volume: 10 workings sets, per muscle group, per week min. threshold, probably wanna look more towards 20-25 sets. 5-30 reps per set.
    • You can change the rep range for each training session
    • Around 1hr 5min. Have to take it to muscular failure, not completely to failure but fairly close. Should feel it. Heuristics
      • Are you feeling th muscle contract
      • Did you feel a big pump after the set
      • Did you feel soreness the next day (mildly)
  • Endurance
    • Excercise choice needs to be concerned with eccentric landing, so like running and that. Start with concentric based activities. Can break it up if you get bored with one excercise
  • Zone 2 shouldn’t really influence hypertrophy or strength. 150/180 min of zone 2 per week.
  • Soreness should be low (about a 3/10)
  • Around 1hr 12m discussion on how thinking you’re going fast can be extremely useful for building up speed.
  • Activating the right muscles in excercies. Work on touching muscle to be activated and get more aware of it. Uses belt as example of improving core muscle activation. e.g. focusing on core being a cylinder around lower back. Breaking movement down, like eccentric pull ups.
  • Breathing can be beneficial for recovery, Huberman said he crashed mentally a couple hours later. Enhale twice as long as inhale for 5 minutes. Even as low as a minute.
  • Got to about the 1hr 50 min mark on Endurance
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4b6Q4gGkF4&t=77s

29/08/22 16:43:47

• Reading abou Irish landscape today. The timescales in geology are ridiculous. The oldest rock in Ireland, in Donegal is 1.7 billion years old. Cambria, is what the Roman’s called Wales, apparentely it was covered in sea and we know most of our stuff from it??? (is this true) anyways, the notion that rocks and stuff create so must division is mad.

08/09/22 13:49:10

• Well, I just discovered the philosophy of Science, which of course I knew about in a way but didn’t realise it was literally asking the same questions I was all this time. Trying to understand the discovery of the electron and theres so much that must be ‘taken for granted’ I understand at some level that this all works, that our modern world is built on this theory but how to I construct a framework to believe that electrons exists. Thompson was doing experiments with cathode ray tubes and discovered them? How do you explain how he knew what he was looking at?
• A fantastic insight I got from Asimov’s science guide was the notion of dogmatism in the scholastic era where Aristotles teaching were so taken for granted as everything that could be know, was known because the initial axioms had been extrapolated upon to their maximum extent. The thought of justification of ones theories through reality was not respected. What appeared to be the case was the case.
• I’m going to try out purposeful study session. To list objectives, most likely questions and pursue answers to those questions in the session. This generally applies for reading as well I think. I thought of creating a list of questions for Physics and slowly answering them.
• Think this is a pretty good video on what a wave is
  • As a wiggle. Then out of this and from the notion of vibration we get a wave like function (cos).
  • Work is done at some point in the wave. The wave propagates that work. When you move a rope up and down the initial work you do is ‘transported’ down the rope.
  • Does energy dissipate as it’s transferred by a wave?
  • ”A wave is the way energy propogates”

• The problem with deductive logic is that the conclusion of a deductively valid argument cannot say more than is implicit in the premises. In a sense, such arguments do not expand our knowledge because their conclusions merely reveal what their premises already state

• Induction in the broadest sense is just any form of reasoning that is not deductive, but in the narrower sense that Bacon uses it, it is the form of reasoning where we generalise from a whole collection of particular instances to a general conclusion.

10/09/22 14:42:49

• Today I’ve ate way too much and its only 3 o clock
• Goals for the rest of today
• 2hr Physics self study (so continue with applied maths and phil. of science)
• 1hr principles of Econ.
• Started reading the World’s fittest book. Could be a good base to gather principles
• Apart from that I need to order some new clothes and a gi.
• Got the pants
• At the end of the day it might just be, keep a strong aerobic base, keep on developing strength. Developing that base as Edgely talked about might take 6 months to a year. Or it could be an ongoing process. Development of sttrenth specifically in shoulders and upper back
  • The section on core work could be interesting to implement
• I was listening to the revolutions podcast. An interesting point about how the ‘ruling class’ propogate ideals to the subjected class to legitimise their rule. What particularly came to mind was the notion of ‘having a dream’ or ‘working hard’ some ‘elites’ would view themselves as the lucky few who followed one of these paths and that all the other class need to do is the same. Is this conscious propagation or a pejorative from a cognitive notion of legitimising yourself?

11/09/22 19:46:44

• Thinking about goals and that, particularly with learning that my heuristic is just time put in as opposed to what I understand or what I haven’t read. Hopefully quality time. If the hours I put in are quality just using that as the metric makes sense

12/09/22 20:07:37

• Looking back at the start of this year and come up with reading goals for end of year
• Check out 29/1 of this year
  • Physics Im still on track with
  • Computation, I’ve gotten a small bit better. I haven’t finished Turing’s paper though
  • Cognitive science, something I need to look at combining with the above
  • I have not done a great job in employing rationality to look at life, particularly with housing. I’ve procrastinated on it.
  • Here were my goals for programming * Programming (tool) * why? * Move my percentile slightly up in terms of programming ability * Have a language that I’m extremely comfortable using in many different contexts (repl, web app etc.) most likely Python at this stage * To be more employable * Goals * Match-tracker to be a fully functioning application * Program a Dapp to have a more in depth understanding of how Blockchain could be used * Develop a more in depth understanding of programming fundamentals (see computation theory above) * Get comfortable with data analysis and statistical analysis * Set up my workshop (Vim etc.) so that on a completely new machine I can recreate my programming environment
  • I’ve found I’m following decently enough my history of science goals
  • Irish history, read and understand a dense text like Modern Ireland (knowledge)
    • why?
      • Obligation as an Irish person
      • General interest
    • Goals
      • Read and understand all the points in Modern Ireland
  • I found with Irish history the passion or motivation just wasn’t there.

15/09/22 13:15:45

• Looking at the coming academic year what are some of my goals?
  • The most important probably has to be my course. The thought though of spending all my time on the course this year seems weird, or a waste or something but it might end up going that way.
  • Economics and History pop to mind as something I’d like to take advantage of. Also, Astrophysics. I need to think about what to let go though because they’re not all possible
  • Back to that first point, this needs to be my priority. While I hope to take advantage of other things I can’t sacrifice the main goal. Hourly goals per week is useful I think even if the hours are not crazy productive at least I’m thinking about the right things.
  • I’ll need to be more specific than this surely. Something that also pops to mind is Roman history and general antiquity studies.
  • Who do I want to be in a year?
    • I want to have more friends
    • Have a high proficiency in Calculus (completed advanced calc. book)
    • Have progressed through electrostatics in Physics.
    • Have finished ‘Principles of Economics’ or have a basic understanding of government level economics, maybe understanding one of Tooze’s books.
    • Having looked into what it might take and look like to pursue a post grad in Astrophysics.
    • Knowledge about western civilization Specifically, Rome and why it influences us today.
    • The fundamentals of fuels and energy production to work from first principles on any energy system that deems to be provided for the wider economy.
    • Splitting these up into over arching projects could be a good idea.
    • Get voice out some how to improve. Writing or coding or something

    • ”The best reading is focused reading, when you’re trying to solve some kind of problem.”

16/09/22 16:56:49

• Read a few articles on what to learn and generally on advice
  • For learning, maybe it’s best to focus on strengths rather than weaknesses. Picking vague areas that you’ve interests in and that you’re good at (normally work in tandem)
    • Also, Becoming well versed in something vs knowing lots of things. You can also become well versed in something like ‘looking at data’ or something like that. For me I would like for it to be something like Calculus
  • Advice is very particular, normally general advice should not govern all your decisions. I think it’s important to analyse myself, what makes me unique, in what aras I’m maybe above the average by like .1 of a standard distribution.
  • I think one area is something computer related. I’ve showed academically that I’ve some aptitude for Computer Science, at least programming. Now, I don’t really know if I actually like this. Also, I’m not fuly sure it’s the programming side of things. Maybe the more theoretical things, any evidence for this?
  • Something that’s been recurring for me is the notion of chasing aesthetics. From admiring the figures drawn by Alex Ross to trying to determine how formal logic works. I think somewhere there a search for a form of things, even if I read a book, whats this tree that everything sits on and can act as the aesthetic representation of the book. This isn’t unique, I know, but the same way someone interested in Maths is not necessarily unique.
  • I would say a recurring theme for me is not having a problem solving or very analytical brain. I can’t inherently tie up loose ends of a formal problem. Say, for applied maths, when I see a problem, I can’t abstractly put it in some space where I can see all the variables and work with those to generate a solution. This may be a practice thing but in terms of casual aptitude for it as others might have.
  • Whether it’s useful or not I try to search for overarching principles in things to pin new information on to. For learning anything new I try to find the things that don’t change or the simple aspects of what we’re supposed to be doing. This is useful if I can get formal with it, formal with first principles. I read a Ben Kuhn post about conviction in your decisions. Determining why you think something will work from a set of foundations, then if it doesn’t work you’re not reasoning through why someone told you it should work and it doesn’t and pinning the new data (of the failure) on to that, you’re updating your own model I suppose.
  • Something I should maybe pay more attention to is Gwern’s book reviews. It seems he latches on to thoughts well in his description of books. The way I’m looking at non-fiction these days is going in with questions, building up context about a question.
  • Another notion was that if I think I want to pursue something (like Astrophysics) then start producing as Paul Graham would say

02/10/22 10:19:25

• Narrowing the funnel of what I need to know in my course to specifically energy related things. For instance, with Physics at the moment I feel drawn into EM waves and that which isn’t crucial to understanding what I need to know for my materials science course. I can definitely learn about EM waves but I do need to keep on top of what I need to know in the short term
• At times I really get the gra for Physics. Like there’s some points I like and don’t like but still. The notion of just building up concepts with maths and trying to use english words to describe it in broad strokes, how some things are intuitive while other things are not and how it doesn’t really matter whether they’re intuitive or not but amazing that they are. For instance, waves, in Physics are likened to waves in the ocean but often times it’s just a general comparison, the waves don’t act like waves of water in all situations. And the way this is verified is experimentation. Wow, this paragraph is illiterate
• Over the next few weeks I’m hoping to read Adam Tooze’s book ‘Crashed’ in the hopes of gaining insight into how he analyses data and generates hypothesis about things. This is an area where I might be able to set myself apart in the energy space and be useful (not just creative or novel in some ‘hot take’).
• health

04/10/22 09:53:08

• You’re going to have to use a lot of physical effort to get out from bad positions (bjj) theres no secret
• Reading ‘Crashed’ the ‘good intentions’ of secularization seems to be to promote Fannie May, to push equity in mortgages lending.

11/10/22 08:41:42

• I’ve a bit of free time this morning and I wanted to write out my narrative of the 2008 Financial crisis, just as part of reading along with Tooze
• The problem is, much like ‘Modern Ireland’ a lot goes over my head, or is information I understand the logic of but can’t attach it to some model already in my head.
• There’s kind of a definitive document on the financial crisis which I should probably use for some guidance.
• It has a lot to do with what one understands banking to be. This is why I’ve taken routes of trying to understand banking to understand it. Banking is counter-intuitive because money is somewhat counter intuitive. Money is trying to produce real wealth, that’s what the ultimate goal of it is. To act as a medium for energy exchange. The growing of the pie is economic growth, producing more things, not for the sake of it but because it makes peoples lives better and on top of that, we add more people. It allows us to have non-corporeal concerns.
  • With this context, banking operates as a firm that tries to incentivise the right kind of growth. It’s kind of a gateway (and gatekeeper?) to ideas and innovation. Banks create loans that hopefully get turned into something productive or useful.
  • If you didn’t have to pay the bank back for a loan you took out, so if they government essentially just gave out money (still with somewhat of a gatekeep) what would that lead to?
  • The role of debt and that is hard to conceptualise, you don’t know if it’s incredibly stupid or optimal or something

17/10/22 13:39:59

• Listening to Adam Tooze last night, because I couldn’t sleep. He talks about the need to get rid of the old notions of the East and the West, the democratic and non democratic. Interestingly, there was a comparison with the fact that the US basically ‘allowed’ a million to die during Covid. China didn’t show any signs of ever letting this happen. So, was a democratic process good there? Is it good for our energy consumption and solving the climate crisis. It’s clear that democracy has it’s faults, there’s some grey areas. That we need to face. In that we need to have flexibility in our perception of these things, what works, whats good for people.

22/10/22 09:14:58

• Before reading another paper on housing. My general thoughts on the popular issues with housing. Is there tax advantages for large institutional investment in housing? If so, what impact would that have on the market. My thinking is that market approaches are one thing and social housing, low income housing another. Market approaches should work for the wider economy based on the average income level. I wonder in Ireland is this exaggerated by income differences between say, tech workers and nurses, if any.
• I’ve been thinking a bit about the possibility of going further in academia after this masters. At the moment it doesn’t seem to be a possibility. I’ve suffered (and probably still am suffering) from a Dunning-Kruger effect of Physics and Chemistry. I think I have decent ability at computers so something like battery optimisation or something might be something realistic. I’m not really too sure if that’s something I want to do for the next 4 years of my life. I’ve never really showed a crazy interest in something like that before now. The notion of becoming an energy trader also sounds a bit shit, I don’t really even know what they do but it sounds pointless. As I wrote out before starting this I really hope to have a solid causal connection towards helping people. I think if I looked into the energy trader thing and could build up that causal connection that would be fine.
• It’s mad how clueless I am about things. I’m basically just trying to build up a secondary school level of Chemistry at the moment and I can’t believe I never came across any of this stuff before, it’s like experimental physics, it’s very practical, it’s really interesting but also there’s lots of concepts to remember. I’d like to come up with a simple project I could do to get more hands on with what I’m learning.
• Studying is hard at the moment, nothing is really clicking so I’m just trying to get the reps in (in terms of just looking at the clock)
• On the housing things I was reading earlier. The main question I have now is why it’s taken us so long to look at housing as a serious issue? How long has it been a serious issue I suppose. I’m still not convinced that institutional investors are squeezing buyers out on a national level. They don’t have a large share of market purchases as far as I can see from the CSO. They are incidents where they take precedents over private individuals which is bad and it seems there’s further law being put in place for this (would need concrete details). The discourse though just repeats the notion of cow towing to foreign investment. It doesn’t really look at why this is bad, what’s the causal chain. It’s projected Ireland need something like 3 billion outside what it has to fund supply, how else do we get that but from ‘international/domestic savings’ through large financial entities?
• I’d like to compare what the breakeven cost of an apartment I’d need or just a average household is. And then look at the market rate. Just to get an idea of the difference and also a notion of how much the minimum cost rental would be.
• Also Donahue says that 30,000 units are to be built this year or come on to the market, which seems not obvious.

23/10/22 20:26:21

• The college goals for the week are studying Equilibria and catching up on Solar cells class.
• If I have time, hopefully some electromagnetism stuff.
• Is my ultimate career goal just to be useful?

28/10/22 19:42:38

• One of the things I’m skeptical of is overly simplistic social theorising which knows in advance what the principle contradiction is going to be.

• e.g. clearly imperialism, late capitalism. It seems in the real world it’s not overly clear whats going on.
• All the above is Tooze.
• How Adam Tooze is so productive
  • Owning the process and acknowledging it as something I want to do
  • Finding a point where you stop (like, where x is good enough, particularly relevant to writing output I suppose)
  • Doing it everyday.
• Picks apart Tiel in this interview as well
• Reading recent entries, specifically 16/9.
  • That aesthetic form that you’re latching on to when you consume some piece of expression from someone else.
  • I find it interesting that this might also exist in non-fiction. For instance, this is what I latch on to in Adam Tooze’s writing there’s a complexity to what he writes about that hints at an underlying vastness of knowledge. RF Foster kind of the same. There’s a fluidity in how much they really know about a topic. It all links in their head and you’re kind of swinging on the branches with them.
  • The goal essentially is to create that structure in your own head.
  • There’s a rigidity to this kind of model too. Most reasons for things are multi faceted, they don’t always add up. I would always try and look for this rational motivation to most things. Some times it’s there, most of the time it kind of makes sense but there are times when it’s not there or different for different people.
  • If you look at the 2008 financial crisis. There’s not always good long term reasons for decisions, just like there’s not always good long term reasons for things we do now.

29/10/22 12:46:32

• I find myself fatigued mentally this morning. Just feeling a bit aimless in what I need/want to do. I tried to think of some activity that de stresses me. All I could think of was to write.
• At the moment, I’m studying a decent amount, I’m not sure if it’s just that though. For instance, with this most recent assignment I’m annoyed at the vagueness of the question, that I should have a more holistic view of things, where to find the answer isn’t straightforward. You could look at it positively that it gives you the opportunity to analyse and review a large amount of the class but I just want to get it over with.
• Another external factor, which kind of soured my taste for learning was the notion of am I good enough at all, I’m faced with really smart people around me, with more experience. It’s not so much that I’m annoyed they have more aptitude at what it is were doing (although I’m sure that plays a role), it just makes me question if I’m capable. Of course, the only way to figure this out is to try. But a sense of self pity creeps in to comfort me in that I don’t have to try, I could just accept one of the two unknowable, the easier one, where I don’t try, so that I never really fail. It’s the comfort of this route that beckons, that’s hard to say no to. The other route also doesn’t have to be this constant slog, it’s just me giving it an honest effort, trying to maintain stress levels, have other things in life etc.
• What makes me happy? What inspires me? I think it’s always good to refresh my days with these things when curiosity has this apathy to it, like today.
• I’m fatigued with being clueless a bit, and I feel lonely in it, though pretty much every one goes through it (even, if at different levels).
• Things haven’t gotten that much better as this day is evolving. I’m not going to push studying today. Think it’s best to just relax, let it happen. Or maybe the obstacle is the way, maybe I should find some way to push through?

30/10/22 10:17:52

• Feeling better today, hoping to do a review of what went well and didn’t go well this week with exercise and that.

• Just off of Adam Tooze, talking about changing ones mindset about things. It occurred to me that some mornings this week I’ve woken up and been hungry or had this want to break my routine or something like that. I frame the routine as some sort of chain holding me back when in actually fact, for this very basic example, eating before doing something like exercise or study isn’t what makes me feel better. More about looking a bit more long term and knowing what works for me. I’m getting better at looking at surrounding things, like whether I’m eating enough and that in this particular case but just taking that mindset of these are not chains, you know what the right answer is.

• It’s hard to know always though. For instance, yesterday I just couldn’t really get going on study, do I push through this, how do I know? One heuristic I have is treating it like training in that you might need a rest day. There is a general amount of volume I’m trying to get in and it should be fairly difficult but not to the point of exhaustion or at least not to this point if I’m not getting enough sleep and rest.

• Andre Karpathy was on Lex Fridman. He spoke about learning things. He speaks mainly about volume being important. That making mistakes and going down wrong paths, wasting time etc. is part of all this. It’s interesting to think that you can really become an expert in anything if you put in the time, whether you can make contributions to the field and that is different. It made me think about the Physics I’ve been doing. I’ve done some good and some bad things in my studies for it, but it has always been fairly focused on volume. It’s also something that can help with doubt, rather than comparing where I am to someone else just realising that it’s a matter of putting the time in, just keeping the head down and focusing on myself or my own progress.

• He also talked about focusing on one problem for particular period of time. To kind of load it up in your memory and think through it. I like this notion, I think it makes sense, I might try and do it for housing over a three day period or something.

• Kit Dale talked about trying to anticipate or at least consider what other people are thinking when you’re rolling, not being totally consumed by it but interestingly the counter point is made by Giancarlo Bodoni where he tries to not think too much about what the other person is doing. Interestingly Kit Dale highlights that he got better when he rolled with the same person again but maybe Bodoni’s stance is that he doesn’t get that opportunity.

• What are some problems I could try and do short spurts on?

• Out for a walk. I’ve decided to focus on that question of what nationalism is for Ireland for January. Also, it’s interesting to think what am I trying to prove.

• Sometimes I’ve this guilt associated with not doing this or that but there’s no tangible thing I’m failing at (because I haven’t set it out). It’s just interesting how I put myself in these mental pretzel’s for no reason.

• I’ve been frustrated even reading non-fiction recently because it feels like it’s a waste of time. I think it would be interesting to at least try the broad question, reading for context approach for a while. Just staying focused on a particular topic and answering my own question.

01/11/22 10:53:49

• I realized that I was playing Levi-Strauss’s game: find some topic to furnish one’s autobiographically driven reflections. As I wrote earlier, genuine literature is not found in the Goncourt circles or among these salon people who go to parties and readings in New York and tag themselves with a “literary” label by deploying a certain vocabulary and mentioning Borges. No, as I said, literature was something fundamentally grounded in its creator, the individual

• I can’t tell if Taleb is a fool or genius and I think that’s what he’s going for.

10/11/22 17:08:37

• I’ve really found these days that what I’m learning is mainly specific technology related problems. For solar cells, what are optical losses, efficiencies etc. and because you’re interacting fundamentally with nature it can be so broad as so much (for instance, on the quantum level) is unknown or at least complex. The same for nuclear technology it’s really specific problems related to efficiency gains or analysing the system quantitatively in general.

13/11/22 16:26:25

• The two-layer structure of the world is the basic reason why Maxwell’s theory seemed mysterious and difficult. The objects on the first layer, the objects that are truly fundamental, are abstractions not directly accessible to our senses. The objects that we can feel and touch are on the second layer, and their behaviour is only determined indirectly by the equations that operate on the first layer. The two-layer structure of the world implies that the basic processes of nature are hidden from our view.

• https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/em/dyson.pdf
• Why do I think I’m a scientist?

14/11/22 08:54:15

• Just thought I’d write this morning, as I really should be most days. It’s almost like I don’t consider it something worthwhile as opposed to possibly the most worthwhile thing I could do in a day.
• Also, I think I just made an aggressively strong cup of coffee. No better time, then, to get into why I should be a scientist.
• The aim here is to do a small bit of revisionist history on indicators as to why being a scientist might suit me.
  • Firstly, the elephant in the room. I’ve never been good at maths or science by academic standards, and even just trying to understand it, it’s never really clicked at all. There is persistence though that I have to understand something. Now, it’s not an other worldly persistence although at times I have been wrapped up in trying to understand something but I would argue that having this element of curiosity and less dramatically a stubbornness to figure out makes up for some of the shortfall, in part.
  • I remember having a discussion with my manager in Workday when I was an intern about getting the CCNA, that I wanted to know the deep roots, the fundamental. He said that this is a natural engineers mindset. I would argue now that it’s more of a scientific mindset. The engineer’s skill lies in almost using what is known to create something new. There’s creativity involved in both aspects (in all aspects of life really).
  • There is an exactness to scientific thinking that appeals to me. How to get the best possible answer. In the past science has changed in my mind to something more fluid as a search for what is. No one is denying some of the philosophy behind what scientist are doing, in that it’s not completely a priori that electrons exist and that but it’s a start.
  • The pursuit of this truth appeals to that natural religious feeling in me. It’s something worthwhile, a way to look past myself and contribute to human knowledge as this abstract concept. The devotion is to ‘what is the case’ to the best of our abilities. I’d like to read a bit more Kierkegaard to relate this from someone who seems to have thought about it a bit more. Does this align with my thinking of being useful? This is also similar to the romantic notion of ‘asymptotically approaching reality’.
  • I would argue that a desire to know has always been within me. When I started watching the Big Bang theory and wanted to become a physicist. The formal nature of physics appealed to me, classifying these complex things into something ‘neat’ specifically, symbolically neat aka ‘cool symbols’. I had no natural aptitude for whatever reason, I liked the idea of it all though. When I read Sagan a bit later on the notion of being right was appealing. Knowing the truth had this sense of loftiness and looking smart, a status thing. Granted, I took the ‘wrong’ message maybe from that and it’s hard to really know what i felt about it at the time (as I said, revisionist history) but there was something that appealed to me about science and truth. Later again, on reading Feynman’s lectures I got the sense that really thinking about the simple concepts in Physics can really reveal a whole lot. Firstly, how novel some of these ideas can be upon thought about them (think, ‘acceleration’ or something you think you know) and also how to formalise such concepts, to stop using language that is ultimately bias towards what we know (admittedly, I’m riffing off of the excellent article I read yesterday about the layers of reality but I think it conveys a fair point).
  • The big point in my mind is: Do I like the activity of doing Science? Because that’s really it. The answer is I’m not too sure and it depends what I’m working on. I will say, that if the notion of being a software engineer is ‘loving building products’ I can’t say it appeals to me generally. It’s of course important but my passion isn’t really in building things more in figuring stuff out.
  • What threads can I explore to clarify things?
    • What does it mean to do Science? Can I get advice on what that would entail?
    • What do I want to know more about, what are my areas of interest?
    • Does this area of interest also meet the criteria of being useful? How general am I willing to go with this criteria? As in, basically anything I do will be useful in some capacity (hopefully) but what specific kind of usefulness.
    • Can I look at doing some ‘Science’ say, a small project?
• I’ve noticed, on reading back through this file, my general thinking hasn’t changed much. The above I would say, is something I would agree with a year ago. There’s bumps and influences from different angles but they seem to appeal to a similar set of values. Think it’s important to acknowledge this similar trend and also how the bumps are only bumps.

16/11/22 08:57:40

• I wouldn’t say I’ve been struggling with the plan for the competition, but just generally tired of it. I think I’m viewing my diet much better, in that, like sleep, just because food is nice doesn’t mean you should have it all the time. Also, it’s important to get enough into you, stop trying to burn the candle at both ends. It’s also good to just focus on what I’m working on. Often, food is a form of procrastination so if I know I’ve had enough it’s a good signal that I’m not engaged enough with what I’m doing.
• I’m feeling a small bit stagnant in BJJ, sometimes I question why I’m doing it. But also, I can’t really see myself not doing it. I like the physical component, I like the type of athlete you’ve to be to be good at it. I like the problem solving element too but I’m feeling pressured to try harder these days, which I will I suppose.
• I don’t love it as much as I do, say, learning or something I feel is integral to my life. Although, all these things eb and flow.
• At the moment, I’m of the feeling that I could do some form of research or would have the capability to do it. I thought about solid state physics. I like how you’ve to touch on fundamentals of reality while analysing materials and their properties.
• I listened to Brad De Long on Sean Carrol’s podcast, I may need to give it another listen, I liked how he was honest about the fact that he had to stick to one particular narrative for his book, even though he knows it’s not absolutely the case or entirely correct.

17/11/22 21:00:53

• Thinking a bit about the SBF FTX stuff, business fundamentals exist mainly as a by product of the human condition. As opposed to some restriction.

20/11/22 08:27:13

• Reading this this morning on leverage
  • ”Finance is in the business of teleporting value over time and space.”
  • Might have to come back to this, didn’t understand a lot of it.

21/11/22 19:09:56

• There’s merit in just trying to look at basic things around you and think about how they work. I’ve always shied away from it because I rarely understand. I think now that I’m starting to see there’s very little to understand in general, or that my exposure to a lot of the concepts has increased it’s easier to be curious, to not know.
• It might be an over simplification to think that my lack of aptitude for things (and people in general) is what kept me back from exploring curiosity. I’d say the answer is hardly that simple, so no point being sad about it.
• Entropy, if we look at molecules in a chamber. The microstates can be incredibly varied and still result in the same macrostate (if microstate is the positions and velocities of individual particles). If each microstate is equally likely then the macrostate we see is the one with the most number of microstates.

22/11/22 09:03:43

• Trying to get into my xmas spirit these days. Went to bjj this morning but just kind of feeling sick of it. Think a break from it is in order.
• I’ve been thinking about the notion of ideas pushed upon people in irish history, propoganda I suppose but more taking advantage of core things people might believe, I guess this is what politics in a popular sense is, that’s what skilled politicians do. I’m specifically referring to the land war and land league that seems kind of fabricated by the media of the time, it was more a movement to get the masses under, rather than some upstart or problem from a regular person. I guess this is how most mass movement’s start but it’s interesting that a lot of Ireland’s identity became wrapped in this landlord tenant dynamic for so long. Bartlett even talks about how it might have held us back or at least kept us conservative.
• I’m generally feeling thankfully today though, even if it’s not particularly strong. I had a warm shower, coffee, I have shelter and can walk to college, things are not bad at all. There’s just a small bit of friction from the bjj which isn’t really a problem at all, or at least, fully within my power to solve.
• The two main areas of interest so far (that kind of maintain optionality) are materials science or solid state physics and combustion analysis. Both of which are unclear to me I just liked some aspects of their content.

24/11/22 14:19:05

• Fairly stressed, or anxious today. I can’t focus on anything. I’m thinking about the competition next week and college and trying to focus but not eat but also being frustrated at not being able to focus in class. It’s a bit of a cycle and I just need to chill out a bit. Firstly, I peaked a bit early on the whole weight things, I tried to go too extreme too soon this week so just gonna go back to eating normally. I’ve learned a few things about myself with this weight cut. That maybe I should try and stay around 73Kg there seems to be no appreciable loss in strength and it might be good for bodyweight stuff and jiu jitsu.
  • I also learned the effect that fasting has. That it can be fine to do it when you’re getting enough food in the window but I’ve found it tricky without just getting enough nutrients in. Especially doing any sort of activity.
  • So food is important, you can’t just cut it out and expect everything to be normal.
  • I would say I slightly regret having the competition right now, just because it’s taking my mind off what’s important. College and just destressing generally. Just focusing my efforts on learning it’s kind of spaced out my concentration.
  • Like most things there’s positives and negatives I suppose.

30/11/22 08:57:03

• Not feeling too bad today. Jiu jitsu went fine this morning. I’m too polite, but also I don’t want to be any other way really.
• I’ve been reading Red Mars (again). This time, I feel more engaged, I just feel more attached to Science. The characters are written well too, they’re interesting. The notion of a new alien terrain is pretty interesting, and the effects it may have on us, the questions it raises, about terraforming; it’s on the precipice of being untouched by humans.
• I listened to a bit of KSR on Ezra Klein’s podcast. He’s a fan of Piketty, so I should try and read him again over the xmas. Economics goes over my head a lot of the time though.
• I wrote about the fact that this youtuber, Tibee was also struggling with having so much free time that she thought she would focus on what she’d to cram into her normal life. It got me thinking about the notion of just being a regular human being, that these are issues everyone faces and I’ve this compulsion to try and be special all the time. I don’t really know why I can’t take the averageness of some parts of me at face value, it might skip a lot of nonsense.
• It looks like we’re moving on from match-tracker, or at least what I’ve built. It’s nice to get it out of my head, I want to start writing a bit more. I was thinking I could do something on ‘Red Mars’ or clean up what I’d done on ‘Foundation’.
• Another thread in my head is the ‘scientist grind’ the kind of hidden dimension to how hard some researchers work. I think in the best sense is trying to answer a question to the best of your ability. It’s a mindset I try to have where if there is something I don’t understand I try to be as exhaustive as I can in understanding it. I think that’s a huge part of it and also, from above, I feel very average at it. There are people a lot more determined. It touches a bit on something Lex said in a Huberman podcast. To forget about balance and just ruthlessly pursue something. I think I disagree to be honest, I also think it’s too specific to making something like a start up etc. I wonder at times if I should be working late into the night most days, but I think I know this would lead me to a bad place mentally. I’m not totally sure of course but that balance of stopping, getting enough sleep etc. is often considered a half arsing of things. In saying that though having high standards about answering questions, mainly, being honest with your self in understanding I think is good, it’s frustrating and annoying and often a waste of time but on the notion of volume (Karpathy from above) it’s still part of learning to learn.
  • For instance, I’ve noticed recently I’m trying to understand a bit more through equations, using them as the guiding points, understanding their assumptions. Rather than trying to intuit or describe in words. It’s a different type of understanding I feel, but a more rigorous one where each signpost is well defined.

02/12/22 07:08:02

• Struggling to sleep these days, had some porridge last night before bed last night which I think may have fucked me.
• Anxious about the competition Sunday. Trying to figure out how to get there. Looking like I’ll cycle depending on what time I’m on at.
• Going to review some nuclear chemistry this morning.

06/12/22 20:50:34

• Trying to finish an electrochemistry lab report that I’ve been looking at for weeks. Starting to feel better about it. Not too sure if I should push through the night and work here. I don’t think so, I think I’ll read Red Mars instead. Probably healthier.
• The competition came and went, it’s nice to not have to think about what I’m eating all the time. Maybe I’ll stay down at this weight, I don’t know.
• This morning I was sick of things, especially just the early morning bjj. I fell better now though and feeling alright about going to it tomorrow. I still need a break though, I think the last while is taking it’s toll on me.
• I’ve been thinking recently about building up intuition. The more I’m exposed to topics the more comfortable I get with them. Not necessarily understanding it any better but it feels like muscle memory with an exercise or something after a while. I wonder how far that can go, can I eventual understand really complicated stuff? Maybe.

11/12/22 17:31:44

• Xmas presents
  • Sean: selection box, scarf.
  • Mom: Candle, book of short stories, kombucha tea bags.
  • Dad: Book, rest is history subscription, lecturn notebook.
• Should I go home tomorrow?
  • pros:
    • more time to figure out what to do with suit
    • Less decisions to make about gym, bjj, study etc.
  • cons:
    • I’ve too much food.
    • Probably won’t go to jiu-jitsu.
    • Might be a bit too rushed.
  • The food debacle isn’t too bad, in theory I could bring the eggs with me.
  • I’m leaving tomorrow.
• I really do struggle sometimes with making my own decisions. I stop listening to myself. But sometimes even I’m not thinking straight. It’s hard. I guess it’s hard to get it all right. You just make a decision and go with it. Tonight I had a lot of anxiety about my decision, I have no clue why. It’s totally fabricated. I started stress eating, managed to stop, nothing too crazy a few chocolate raisins. But I constantly surprise myself with how volatile I can be. I guess it’s a win to recognise it, to try and calm myself, so I going to scratch that up as a win.

24/12/22 07:32:01

• Didn’t sleep too great. Think I’m either fighting off something or just tired. It’s been hard enough to keep studying these past few weeks. It’s hard to keep my mind off it.
• I’m hoping to use this time around Christmas to have a think too. To reevaluate how things are going, where I am, all that. But thinking about study has been all consuming. I don’t think it needs to be but it requires some belief in my own process which at times I don’t have.
• I started reading the ‘Poppy War’ by R.F Kuang. I like it. Fucking vim just erased a load of what I’d written there. Anyways, the ‘fantasy’ aspect of the book draws on an ancient power, not totally understandable. In order for Rin to understand she must move away from the imperative nature of here schooling, the linear fashion, the rationality of her thoughts to this kind of middle ground. She talks about the ‘why’ of certain stories, like why lots of peoples through history conjure up similar heroes and villains and story structures. That maybe this ancient ‘magically’ power had knowledge of why this was, were able to tap into, whatever that was. It just seems like an interesting approach to controlling some unknown power. I think it’s more than just being ‘spiritual’ but an element to the unknown to how we can be controlled by stories, or why they appeal to us that we can’t completely understand by some Science at the moment.
• Fuck this keyboard.
• Uh, I just wrote this out. This rolls into the Latour modernity stuff. That I can consider myself a scientifically minding person yet maintain that there could be something unknown about human religious and mythological belief system, that it affects us in an unscientific way. I think a counter could be though that I ‘believe’ that a determined way exists, that eventually through Science you would discover it.
• I get annoyed sometimes when I’m chatting to people who kind of think of Science as some belief system in a religious sense. It’s not! it’s a method of thinking. It doesn’t really matter whether you believe in it or not. People are still going to think in a way to try and align with reality, when they’re putting rockets on the moon, washing their hands before surgery, increasing the efficiency of engines etc. I think it’s fucking stupid that people think human belief plays a role in it, the whole point is to get rid of human belief. That’s where Latour is a more interesting discussion, having some interaction with what we are doing is important, how we relate to it. But the notion that nature cares what you think about how it behaves is bonkers.
• I don’t really know what to do this morning. Probably just read and get ready for dinner tomorrow.

31/12/22 10:12:53

• Recently, it’s popped into my head more and more about the ‘volume’ approach to learning. I watched Tar last night, at one point I was thinking: Could someone take part in an orchestra like that after a small amount of crammed training. I thought, yeah maybe, but you wouldn’t have the same adaptability, you would effectively be useless in that you could play the one piece. Although, if you got sufficiently good, maybe. But lets just say you had to get fairly specialised and cut some corners as is most likely in these things. It’s essentially useless to learn the thing.
  • This is similar to how I view most skill learning since starting jiu-jitsu. Is this something I have time to put volume into, have already got volume under my belt in. I think it helps put what you’re trying to learn into perspective and focus on whether you really like learning the thing, or at least be conscious of that’s what you’ll mainly be doing.
  • Anecdotally, I’ve found this to be the case in studying for my masters. Just reading topics over and over, or being exposed to them, does promote a kind of familiarity that helps in learning.
  • I also wonder, I’ve read a bit about tacit knowledge before which I would consider is what is gained through volume. There might be a way to make this process slightly more efficient, you’re not negating it completely but could improve it.
  • In this light, one thing I’m hoping to do this year is read more as a habit, mainly fiction like fantasy/sci-fi. This could involve just trying new books and in turn, probably reading bad books. Looking at it as refining your notion of what you like, or at least have some mode of comparison and finally, just reading for the sake of reading, not always trying to read the exact book to impact you or something from a top 10 list.
• Another theme that’s running through my life at the moment is the simple notion that ‘my thoughts are not me’. I think i read this in an RTE article of all places but the notion that every thought doesn’t have to be taken seriously just seemed to hit me at that time. Throughout the process of preparing for the competition, I found that when I reminded myself that, I’m voluntary doing this and/or I don’t need food, I’m actually not tired etc. it kind of got rid of a cloud of self-pity. It harkens on what Tooze talked about, just convincing yourself that this is something you like doing. I think in a lot of cases this can work, I think maybe it can be that simple for me sometimes. Similarly, the ideas from the Philosophize this podcast on Kierkegaard. Finding a path and just sticking to it. I’m sure this has some motif routes.
• I’ve been thinking as well about other people. I don’t really give people a fair draw. Often, I’m much too focused on myself. For instance, if someone I know is what I might consider cranky, or not agreeable to me in some fashion. I don’t really put myself in their shoes. Firstly, how I might be affecting them, if not that then what’s going on for them and finally just assuming that who they are is totally defined by who I think they are. I’m thinking of Alan and Sean here in these contexts. Specifically, people I often don’t feel I get on with at all, like GAA types etc.
• In a couple weeks, when exams are over, I’d like to have a bit of a retrospective and look forward, what kind of person I’m trying to be etc.
  • Writing more, read more, reduce YT, health goals general year review in couple weeks.
  • Organise reading around context. War for Jan and Feb along with Dominion or religion??
• I watched an interesting talk with Seb Falk about how we look at Science in history. We automatically assume that past Science should be our science. We don’t often appreciate that definitions for ‘growth’ and ‘science’ may have been different in history. For instance, he talks about how science in the middle ages was about understanding god. Understanding the natural world was incredibly important to them, it meant getting closer to god. There is no really definition for pseudo science, so taking a moral high ground in that you are some percentage correct if you’re some percentage close to what our ideas are does seem a bit arbitrary. It involves somewhat dissociating the intelligence of human of the past from their beliefs or motives. Say, denouncing Newton because he studied ‘alchemy’.
  • Approaching it from a more relative point of view, stating the foundations to your thinking (which isn’t easy) or at least being willing to acknowledge them is a start.

04/01/23 19:55:44

• I listened to a podcast today about choosing great movies. Does a movie have to be cohesive, is it a bad film if 5 minutes of it is revolutionary or good? Similar trend to reading the Poppy war.

10/01/23 08:11:00

• Last night, in my dream, someone was preventing me from getting up on to some ledge. For some reason, I remember having complete determination to make it, focusing on holding my fingers to the ledge as tightly as possible, trying really hard, not caring about the consequences. I still fell, but it was weird how hard I tried, and I wasn’t scared.

15/01/23 16:32:58

• Hoping to use this week to review the year. This format of one big text file is hitting its limitation I think. There needs to be a better where to navigate it, particularly to group themes.
• Some things I’m hoping to do this year:
  • Read more, as mentioned before, specifically with a volumetric approach but also to engage with literature (so maybe trying to understand Shakespeare).
  • Have structure to my exercise goals, having a few tenets and ‘facts’ that I structure my exercise around. So that I can call back to them when unsure.
  • Having the same thing, broadly for my health goals.
  • Work on context when reading non-fiction. Developing context by the month in what I’m reading.
  • Get some sort of physical hobby.

21/01/23 09:56:57

• On the notion of ‘gettng a physical hobby’, maybe something like astrophotography. Think it would combine a lot of different interests together.
• I’ve been reading a bit about film recently and I would put it into the category of: Finding out why I like what I like. Same as some music.
• I watched a documentary on Shenzhen in China. A region the size of a medium sized irish county that just blows up in the late 20th to 21st century. It has a radical hardware orientated culture. It’s inspiring to look at, and I wonder if there is something there in terms of energy innovation.

23/01/23 08:58:41

• listened to a podcast on China Taiwan.
• What I found interesting was the kind of cost analysis of China invading Taiwan. It rung true of the notion of what people are willing to give up for the sake of nationalism or some propoganda reason in China. I think we assume that all of the Chinese population would want war a war time economy. I think it’s fair, with one of the largest middle classes in the world that this is not the case. Although, like all things, would this be fully understood as the costs? Is it evident to those in China (both in government and citizen) that these kind of costs could happen.
• Going to try and re arrange notetaking a small bit.
• The notion of affordance and Human interaction design… hm.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rlF-qE-vsM