A Foolish Consistency

"Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something."

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:16:05 -0400

“Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”

- Henry David Thoreau (via newfilosofee)

"We accept reality so readily- perhaps because we sense that nothing is real."

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:45:00 -0400

“We accept reality so readily- perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.”

- Borges, “The Immortal”

rahmin: jonathanmoore: Creativity is just connecting...

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:50:28 -0400

rahmin:

jonathanmoore:

Creativity is just connecting things.

The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we have.

Via Kitsune Noir

A Different Perspective on Running

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 10:00:00 -0400

I’ve recently been raving about Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run; this extended love letter to the art of running can inspire even the most lackadaisical runner to strap on a pair of shoes and get on the trail because of how strongly the author expresses the conviction that, well, we’re born to run [1]. More generally, and apart from mere inspirational purposes, the writing-about-running genre has intrigued me of late because of the poetry implicit in any description of such an awesome (in its literal sense) endeavor as long-distance running, where pushing bodily limits, testing human will, and forcing unyielding dedication upon oneself are routine and necessary [2].

So it’s no surprise that I spared little hesitation in reading John L. Parker’s Once a Runner as soon as I heard about it. The fiction, apparently a cult classic and required reading among competitive runners, is hailed by Runner’s World as “the best novel about running ever written”, and does not disappoint [3]. This page-long excerpt shares the competitive runner’s perspective, that of someone who doesn’t run because of any deeper meaning to be found in the act, but rather because it’s the only meaning there is. Spiritual, material, worldly aspirations dissolved and manifested in pursuit of physical perfection— beautiful.

“Cassidy sought no euphoric interludes. They came, when they did, quite naturally and he was content to enjoy them privately. He ran not for crypto-religious reasons, but to win races, to cover ground fast. Not only to be better than his fellows, but better than himself. To be faster by a tenth of a second, by an inch, by two feet or two yards, than he had been the week or year before. He sought to conquer the physical limitations placed upon him by a three-dimensional world (and if Time is the fourth dimension, that too was his province). If he could conquer the weakness, the cowardice in himself, he would not worry about the rest; it would come. Training was a rite of purification; from it came speed, strength. Racing was a rite of death; from it came knowledge. Such rites demand, if they are to be meaningful at all, a certain amount of time spent precisely on the Red Line, where you can lean over the manicured putting green at the edge of the precipice and see exactly nothing.

Anything else that comes out of that process was by-product. Certain compliments and observations made him uneasy; he explained that he was just a runner; an athlete, really, with an absurdly difficult task. He was not a health nut, was not out to mold himself a stylishly slim body. He did not live on nuts and berries; if the furnace was hot enough, anything would burn, even Big Macs. He listened carefully to his body and heeded strange requests. Like a pregnant woman, he sometimes sought artichoke hearts, pickled beets, smoked oysters. His daily toil was arduous; satisfying on the whole, but not the bounding, joyous nature romp described in the magazines. Other runners, real runners, understood it quite well.

Quenton Cassidy knew what the mystic-runners, the joggers, the runner-poets, the Zen runners, and others of their ilk were talking about. But he also knew that their euphoric selves were generally nowhere to be seen on dark, rainy mornings. They primarily wanted to talk it, not do it. Cassidy very early on understood that a true runner ran even when he didn’t feel like it, and raced when he was supposed to, without excuses and with nothing held back. He ran to win, would die in the process if necessary, and was unimpressed by those who disavowed such a base motivation. You are not allowed to renounce that which you never possessed, he thought.

The true competitive runner, simmering in his own existential juices, endured his melancholia the only way he know how: gently, together with those few others who also endured it, yet very much alone. He ran because it grounded him in basics. There was both life and death in it; it was unadulterated by media hype, trivial cares, political meddling. He suspected it kept him from that most real variety of schizophrenia that the republic was then sprouting like mushrooms on a stump.

Running to him was real; the way he did it the realest thing he knew. It was all joy and woe, hard as diamond; it made him weary beyond comprehension. But it also made him free.”

1. The title says so!

2. It’s why I express profuse admiration for all high-caliber athletes in general; endurance athletes, though, have it the roughest and are the ones that truly get to confront the big questions of Human Body and Spirit.

3. With a blurb like that, how could it? Trust the blurb.

Steve sticking to his guns- Apple’s core product strategy,...

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 14:36:34 -0400

Steve sticking to his guns- Apple’s core product strategy, right there starting at the 3:45 mark. Love it.

"When we escape from the place we spend most of our time, the mind is suddenly made aware of all..."

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 00:38:42 -0400

“

When we escape from the place we spend most of our time, the mind is suddenly made aware of all those errant ideas we’d suppressed. We start thinking about obscure possibilities …

Seasoned travellers are alive to ambiguity, more willing to realise that there are different (and equally valid) ways of interpreting the world. This in turn allows them to expand the circumference of their “cognitive inputs”, as they refuse to settle for their first answers and initial guesses.

”

- Jonah Lehrer (via heyamberrae’s tumblelog)

Part of why I love to travel and have, especially recently, been gripped by wanderlust

Reading 2666

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 20:55:24 -0400

And Bolaño’s magnificent so far:

“The second conversation, radically longer than the first, was a conversation between friends doing their best to clear up any murky points they might have overlooked, a conversation that refused to become technical or logistical and instead touched on subjects connected only tenuously to Norton, subjects that had nothing to do with surges of emotion, subjects easy to broach and then drop when they wished to return to the main subject, Liz Norton, whom, by the time the second call was nearing its close, both had recognized not as the Fury who destroyed their friendship, black clad with bloodstained wings, nor as Hecate, who began as an au pair, caring for her children, and ended up learning witchcraft and turning herself into an animal, but as the angel who had fortified their friendship, forcibly shown them what they’d known all along, what they’d assumed all along, which was that they were civilized beings, beings capable of noble sentiments, not two dumb beasts debased by routine and regular sedentary work, no, that night Pelletier and Espinoza discovered that they were generous, so generous that if they’d been together they’d have felt the need to go out and celebrate, dazzled by the shine of their own virtue, a shine that might not last (since virtue, once recognized in a flash, has no shine and makes its home in a dark cave amid cave dwellers, some dangerous indeed), and for lack of celebration or revelry they hailed this virtue with an unspoken promise of eternal friendship, and sealed the vow, after they hung up their respective phones in their respective apartments crammed with books, by sipping whiskey with supreme slowness and watching the night outside their windows, maybe seeking unconsciously what the Swabian had sought outside the widow’s window in vain.”

41 pages in, and I’m in for a wild ride.

Why I'm rooting for Brazil in the World Cup

Sat, 22 May 2010 16:34:00 -0400

First of all, sorry for the extensive footnotes in this post (and likely throughout my writing). I’m a huge David Foster Wallace fan and I think I understand his use of the footnote/endnote tool as a way to relate tangential points without interrupting the flow of the primary exposition. Anyways, to the meat of this post.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a passionate, die-hard fan of NBA basketball, to the extent that I know or care little about other sports. I’m a fan of the technique, the athleticism, and the artwork that are all inherent in such a high-skill environment (1).

So, when it came time for me to pick a team to root for during the Cup (which I’m going to with 5 of my best buddies from high school, something I’m infinitely excited about), I was initially wary. A die-hard fan like myself understands the issues related to team fandom, mostly concerning the concept of a “bandwagon” supporter who roots for whichever team is most likely to be successful, not a team that they truly care about and would support through thick and thin (2).

In thinking about who to support, I thought about my own love for basketball— why I love the sport, who I choose to root for, and how I relate to the game. I think sport is beautiful, and at its finest transcends a game into an art form (read some more of my thoughts about that here, when I quote Werner Herzog). I’m always partial to players that enhance this view— people like Kobe Bryant, Chris Paul, Pau Gasol, Steve Nash, Jason Kidd— who with their mastery of technique turn sports into something beautiful (3). I realized that I’ve subsconsciously rooted for Brazil the last couple of World Cups because of this— their flair for the game, their bravado, their willingness to experiment and have fun and just play beautifully. This is obviously a widely recognized fact— Nike’s last World Cup ad campaign revolved around promoting this style of play— Joga bonito— play beautiful. Watch one of these clips and see if you don’t feel like dancing or clapping your hands (seriously, watch them. They are awesome.). It means so much more than sports. It’s art.

And that is why I’m rooting for Brazil in the World Cup.

1. I firmly believe that basketball players are the most skilled athletes in terms of combination of athletic ability and talent. Perhaps I’m a little biased in this view considering I’ve played basketball since I was 8, but bear with me.

2. Picking a sports team is really like choosing a wife. It’s someone you love, whose flaws you acknowledge and choose to overlook or cope with, and decide to support no matter what the present circumstances are. Philandering and cheating are not acceptable.

3. It’s the same reason I root for Roger Federer whenever I watch tennis. It’s also why I will never quite love players like Lebron James or Rafael Nadal, who rely on their brute force and physical dominance to excel at the sport. Awesome in its own right, but never quite beautiful.

EMRFindr!

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 04:33:00 -0400

I just got done with the “demo day” of my yearlong senior design project for Systems Engineering at Penn, and figured I’d blog about it.

Senior design is a yearlong project that everyone in the engineering school has to complete- students are split into teams and pick a topic to work on at the start of the year, and work on completing an engineering design in their relevant field of study that helps tackle the problem. The project essentially culminates in demo day, where each group presents their results with posterboards in front of panels of judges.

My systems project dealt with the realm of medical IT— more specifically the issue of electronic medical record systems (EMRs). EMRs are basically enterprise software systems that help digitize all medical records and billing information within a practice (patient history, past prescriptions, insurance information, etc.). There’s been a big push for hospitals and medical practices to digitize their records, because of the potential lowered costs due to higher efficiency, better workflows, and less prescription/billing errors. In light of this potential, the Obama administration has even offered a federal stimulus to all practices that adopt EMRs by 2016 as an incentive. So, there are numerous factors in place to bring about a big shift to universal adoption of electronic records within the medical industry. However, hospitals have been slow to adopt because of how fragmented and complicated the medical IT marketplace is, with over 200 vendors, little standardization of product features, and incredibly complex installation procedures. My team used this understanding to build a tool that helps medical doctors and practices pick which EMR product to install in their practice.

We realized that for the shift to EMRs happen, there needed to be an open, information-heavy marketplace that was consumer-friendly. The market right now is basically controlled by the vendors- price information is hard to find unless you sit through sales demos, it’s tough to get reviews unless you hire consultants, and it’s hard to find which EMRs even fit your practice in the first place. We built a tool called EMRfindr that brings all of this information together in one place, and lets medical practices find which EMR is best for them based on their own practice’s characteristics (how many doctors, medical specialty, preference for cloud/local computing, etc.). A lot of the value here is simply in the data we collected, bringing together comprehensive information from disparate sources and making it publicly available and searchable. This wealth of information in one source is especially valuable because the key stakeholders in this scenario are medical professionals making the IT investment decision. They just don’t have the time or resources, while running a medical practice, to deal with a complex IT search process.

Check the tool out!*

You can click around the site to learn more about the topic, and to see some of the methodology we used for data collection and analysis.

We’re happy with the prototype we built in under a week, since it pretty easily demonstrates the clear value of such a tool. It would be cool if someone in the medical IT industry took note and attempted a similar project on a large scale with actual advanced data collection about different EMR vendors! For the EMR shift to happen, transparency needs to be the market norm.

*A good amount of time by a couple coding novices went into building that the last few days. My teammate Abhi coded the search engine, form, and results in SQL and PHP, while I did the design and wrote some HTML and basic CSS.

Not much to look at, but we’re pretty proud of our efforts making it in less than a week after extensive data collection! A new goal of mine is to get really good at web design.

Always impressed by systems that recognize and account for human...

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:15:55 -0400

Always impressed by systems that recognize and account for human behavior. Be thoughtful about the way you build your product and make your users’ lives a little easier.

it’s all about the crystalizabeths [biggie vs. the xx]

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:39:57 -0400

it’s all about the crystalizabeths [biggie vs. the xx]

“This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a...

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 02:31:00 -0400

“This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different form or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc.— and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and they’re just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant. […] Words and chronological time create all these total misunderstandings of what’s really going on at the most basic level. And yet at the same time English is all we have to try to understand it and try to form anything larger or more meaningul and true with anybody else, which is yet another paradox.”

- DFW, Good Old Neon. yes!

Dorkapalooza 2010!

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:40:00 -0500

This past Saturday was my first time attending the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, on the second leg of my spring break trip. With over 1000 folks packed into the Boston Conference Center to hear about the evolving role of statistics and technology used in sports, the event dubbed “Dorkapalooza” by ESPN pop sports writer Bill Simmons pretty easily lived up to the hype.

The Panels

I went to 5 panels- below are my notes detailing the key insights from each discussion. [I got tired of typing so my comments get increasingly sparse. This was a long post so please point out any typos.]

——————————————————————————————————-

1. Next Generation Sports Management

This panel sought to address the evolving role of sports ownership in general, with economic problems, globalization, and new technology all poised to effect big changes in the nature of salary cap rules, revenue sharing, and sports entertainment.

There’s been a growing recognition of sports as a good investment; this has been reflected in the increased activity of overseas owners acquiring stakes in American teams (the Cavs and Nets immediately come to mind).
In that vein, sports are a sustainable business; compared to other industries, sports teams are not displaced by new technology. (Some MLB and NFL teams have been around for 100s of years, compared with the lifecycle of your average Fortune 500 subject to competitive pressures, changing consumer behavior, and periodic economic upheaval)
On the perennial question of the tradeoff between wins & profitability (which is an issue assuming that spending is correlated with wins, a fact that’s been proven in baseball and still holds true in other sports like basketball and football):
Sports is a “quasi-public good”. If you’re a profitable team that happens to be perennially unsuccessful (the Clippers were the running joke in this conference— exactly the type of unenlightened, uninformed leadership that this generation of execs is trying to combat), you run the risk of alienating your fan base. A popular refrain throughout the day was the correlation between wins and profitability— a winning team generates interest and a passionate fan base, which is ultimately the only sustainable way to be profitable.

——————————————————————————————————-

2. International Expansion

With the rapid globalization and spread of appreciation of American sports globally, the next frontier for American sports leagues is overseas expansion. Exploring this topic were some big names— Sunil Galati, head of the US Soccer Federation (leading the MLS and the US bid for the 2018 FIFA World Cup); Mark Waller, CMO of the NFL; Maurizio Gherardini, senior VP of the Toronto Raptors; and David Baxter, president of the adidas Sports Licensed division. The vast experience of these speakers resulted in a discussion as anthropological as it was technical/managerial.

A big challenge in taking sports like (American) football global is in translating the cultural experience. For a game as complex as the NFL, even the simplest play-by-play commentary is difficult to follow for fans not well-versed in the sport.
For the MLS, it’ll be tough to turn demand for the SPORT of soccer into demand for the MLS product, especially when the MLS clearly isn’t the top-caliber soccer league in the world. The expansion strategy will have to shift to reflect this reality.
Gherardini made some good points about how the dynamics of sports in US and Europe are completely different. Europe employs an “open” system, where essentially anyone with enough money can start a new team and move up and down leagues depending on their success, while the US is a closed system more controlled by league-wide mandates. Also different is how sports are treated by fans—according to Gherardini, in Europe, “once the game’s started, it’s like Church. You can’t move!”. This explains why always-open concession stands aren’t a widespread phenomenon in European sports venues, simply because no one wants to leave their seats during the match.
On the risk of top players going overseas? Not very likely, due to the competition and level of play here. But, Europe will definitely evolve as a destination for player development, as some players (like the case of Jennings) can advance rapidly by being in a different environment.
Seeding sports in a new country is a long-term process of brand-building that requires patience. The NBA has done the best job to date with its international strategy.
The BRIC economies will be the next big destination for sports expansion.
Keeping with the notion of sports expansion as long-term, Gulati views soccer in the US on a 50-year time horizon. Soccer popularity is slowly growing in this country (Americans are the #1 ticket buyers for the 2010 World Cup!). He sees the next 6 months as potentially being the most crucial period in the history of US soccer— with the US-England match in June, and the results of the World Cup bid announced in December. Should be fun to watch.
We probably won’t see NBA teams based overseas anytime soon, because the dimension of potential business in Europe isn’t big enough to make that viable. The “TV countries” (the ones that watch the most) in Europe aren’t the same countries that care about basketball, which is a huge factor given that TV revenue streams are a big part of sports league revenue.

——————————————————————————————————-

3. What Geeks Don’t Get

This was basically the headline event of the day— Mark Cuban (owner of the Dallas Mavs), Darryl Morey (GM of the Houston Rockets), Jonathan Kraft (part of the Kraft Group, owner of the NE Patriots), Bill Polian (GM of the Indy Colts), and Bill Simmons (ESPN writer) were joined by writer Michael Lewis to discuss, in a nutshell, the state of the sports analytics industry. The panel was more entertaining than educational, and watching the three “basketball” guys (Morey, Cuban, Simmons) go back and forth was fun.

The overarching theme— communication is key, because no matter how useful the stats are, they need to have wide applicability and be easy to understand to actually matter.
Kraft was a detriment to the discussion, contributing almost no useful information other than detailing the vagaries of statistical analysis in football. Bill Polian had some good insights on how- 1) the sample size in football is so small and makes trend tracking difficult, 2) coaches have basically been using analytics in stats and video for over 30 years, and advanced statistics are hard to use in football.
The players don’t need to understand the details; it’s up to the GM and coach to implement the findings. Interesting is the evolving role of the GM as decision-maker and planner for the organization.
Mark Cuban had some cool thoughts about the importance of psychological analysis for basketball players. He outed Gerald Green as a moron.

——————————————————————————————————-

4. Basketball Analytics

Discussing the state of analytics in basketball was a panel featuring Cuban, John Hollinger (ESPN), Kevin Pritchard (Blazers GM), Mike Zarren (Celtics asst. GM), Dean Oliver (author of the Bible of basketball analytics, Basketball on Paper), and Marc Stein (ESPN writer).

- One of the biggest issues with basketball right now is the lack of standardized collection of advanced statistics (things like deflections, charges, etc., all variables that any team that uses statistical analysis spends significant capital and effort on individually collecting). A big shift in the next couple of years will be when the league finally starts systematizing the collection of this data and making it available to teams.

A cool statement from Dean Oliver on a tell-all metric: “+/- is just a fact. Adjusted +/- is an analysis.”
The biggest tell as to whether stats are being used by teams- looking at the lineups that coaches play. That’s probably the most effective way to use statistics, analyzing what players work best together against certain lineups.
Box scores are so limited now because they capture the outcome of only 20% of defensive plays (blocks, steals, etc.). They don’t talk about stops, deflections, missed shots, who made a mistake on the play, etc.- things that really matter.
Video tracking- the kind that’s offered by Synergy Sports- will be the “quantum leap” in basketball analytics.
Read more about this panel on Truehoop.

——————————————————————————————————-

5. Future of Sports Journalism

This was a fascinating discussion on how new media is affecting how we follow sports, so it was more a journalism conversation than a sports talk.

“Destination media” is increasingly valueless. The value lies in individuals as platforms for providing good, accurate content that can be trusted over time.
Breaking news and scoops are no longer important when information becomes commodified within minutes. It doesn’t matter to be first anymore; what matters is your ability to provide deeper analysis/inside commentary. Long-form journalism will be very valuable. “What’s durable is authority.”
“Audiences are driven by the ability to be smarter”; it’s crucial to make your content easily accessible and allow your readers to be their own news-gatherers.
Broadcasters and their audiences are simultaneously creating content, and it’s possible to instantaneously understand how people are reading and reacting to things you write.
People have a notion of “if the news is important, it’ll find me.”
ESPN is still trying to figure out its most effective real-time strategy and the right mix between curating/creating content, a topic particularly germane to me given my work on TickrTalk.

——————————————————————————————————-

The People

Probably the coolest part of the day was seeing all the big NBA and ESPN names in attendance. Because of the nature of the event, everyone was accessible and open for conversation- it was great to be able to pick the brains of people like Mark Cuban, Bill Simmons, Brent Barry, Marc Stein, David Thorpe, Henry Abbott, Mike Zarren, Howard Beck, and Jason Fry. This aspect of the event alone made going worthwhile.

The Big Picture

Blazers GM Kevin Pritchard described the use of analytics in basketball as still “in the second inning”. Just under half the teams in the NBA had representatives in attendance at the conference, and the attendees radiated the kind of palpable buzz one senses at the beginning of a large movement (aside: the last time I felt a similar mix of optimism and enthusiasm was at an Obama rally during the Pennsylvania primaries). People bemoan the sports industry’s woes in this economy, but the smart leadership on display at this event convince me that it’ll move in the right direction. Sports seems to be leading other industries in its efficient use of data and technology, and the future’s exciting.

"We must stop looking at education as a product – in which we turn out every student giving the same..."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:14:21 -0500

“We must stop looking at education as a product – in which we turn out every student giving the same answer – to a process, in which every student looks for new answers. Life is a beta.”

- TEDxNYed: This is bullshit « BuzzMachine (via kareem) (via rahmin)

"We live in a culture that sees extreme exercise as crazy,” Dr. Bramble says, “because..."

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 22:07:29 -0500

““We live in a culture that sees extreme exercise as crazy,” Dr. Bramble says, “because that’s what our brain tells us: why fire up the machine if you don’t have to?”
To be fair, our brain knew what it was talking about for 99 percent of our history; sitting around was a luxury, so when you had the chance to rest and recover, you grabbed it. Only recently have we come up with the technology to turn lazing around into a way of life; we’ve taken our sinewy, durable, hunter-gatherer bodies and plunked them into an artificial world of leisure.”

- Just read, and enjoyed, Chris McDougall’s “Born to Run”. Here’s my review of it, on Goodreads

I just read this passage from 2666: “He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby...

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 06:09:37 -0500

I just read this passage from 2666:

“He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick… What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”

I’m always excited to hear about a book or piece of art where the author or creator just nailed it in terms of expressing the magnitude— both glory and tragedy— of existence (that’s why I love Kerouac and DFW!); Bolaño hinted at this skill in Savage Detectives and I can’t wait to pick his magnum opus up.

"Correctly evaluating a small handful of moves is far more important in human chess, and human..."

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:13:43 -0500

“Correctly evaluating a small handful of moves is far more important in human chess, and human decision-making in general, than the systematically deeper and deeper search for better moves—the number of moves “seen ahead”—that computers rely on.
[…]
Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors.”

- Garry Kasparov, The Chess Master and the Computer

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a..."

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:32:43 -0500

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits
in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.”

- Helen Keller (via kareem)

Yup.

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 03:16:27 -0500

Yup.

"But the culture in which I and almost all whites were raised vainly imagines that hunger, sleeping,..."

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:11:25 -0500

“But the culture in which I and almost all whites were raised vainly imagines that hunger, sleeping, and excreting can be regimented. Amerindians have always mocked the palefaces for looking at clocks to know when they ought to be hungry. It is in the same clock-mad spirit that we are all supposed to “work” from nine to five on such preposterous projects as accounting for what we have done upon billions of square miles of paper derived from devastated forests, frittering away our time upon such dreary gambling games as playing the stock market or selling insurance in drab offices, turning out drillions of lines of chatter for people whose minds cannot be at peace unless perpetually agitated with information and misinformation, and manufacturing, selling, and advertising bizarre, noisome, and pestilential automotive contraptions for taking us all to and from these same projects at the same hours— thereby blocking the roads and jangling our nerves, presumably to give ourselves the message that we really exist and are really important.”

- Alan Watts, in his autobiography In My Own Way. So far, it’s an excellent portrait of the inner life of what the NYT calls “perhaps the greatest Western interpreter of Eastern thought in the modern world”. While probably one of his most banal thoughts throughout the book, he resonates particularly well with me and my thoughts on impending post-collegiate life when he goes on to say, “Therefore, at the age of twenty-one, I made to myself the solemn vow that I would never be an employee or put up with a “regular job”“.