Notes & scribblings.
❐ Highlights ❐ Notes Highlights Civilization cannot exist without spoken language, but it can without written communication. The earliest writings from Mesopotamia, fired clay tablets dating from around 3300 BC, are all accounting records. The earliest writing from Europe, the Linear A and Linear B clay tablets from Crete/mainland Greece belonging to the mid-2nd millennium BC, are account records.…
❐ Highlights ❐ Notes Highlights [...] this is a book about the similarities; and once these are understood the differences will be found to be much less great than is popularly (and politically) supposed. [...] that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive…
❐ Highlights ❐ Notes Highlights A great discovery solves a great problem but there is a grain of discovery in the solution of any problem. Yes, the solution seems to work, it appears to be correct; but how is it possible to invent such a solution? Yes, this experiment seems to work, this appears to be a fact; but how can people discover such facts? And how could I invent or discover such things by…
Ignore the horribly cliché title, I've really had a delicious cup of coffee today. And even better, I was able to immediately focus on something I was working on as soon as I finished that coffee, it was instantaneous. It was so good that it even made me come back to Bearblog after months and finally write something. Anything . I always want to create a better discipline for writing, even if it's…
❐ Highlights ❐ Notes Highlights "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,‐that is genius." - Emerson The soul and its cultivation were the primary preoccupations of the Transcendentalists in everything they said and did, from the pursuit of self-reliance to social reform. "Self-culture" was the defining characteristic of the age,…
❐ Highlights Highlights [To the question of "If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"] Some clever answers: “If I’m not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.” “Because the government gets to define what’s wrong, and they keep changing the definition.” “Because you might do something wrong with my information.” My problem with quips like these—as right as…
There is a gulf between authentic imperfection and sterile perfection. I recently came across Joan Westenberg's ideas on what separates builders from non-builders . Perfectly put: The creator who can stomach early embarrassment eventually produces work that is far less embarrassing than someone who has waited for perfection. This happens through multiple mechanisms: practice improves skill,…
Last week, I listened to a podcast series called A History of the Infinite , which started off with a quote by David Hilbert that says "no other concept stands in greater need of clarification than that of the infinite." It starts with Pythagoras and his disciples, who saw the infinite as something bad because it was the opposite of the finite, which was supposed to be "good," just like their…
❐ Highlights ❐ Notes Highlights [The machines] there is no reason why they may not resemble human beings in representing pockets of decreasing entropy in a framework in which the large entropy tends to increase. [...] Thus, the nervous system and the automatic machine are fundamentally alike in that they are devices which make decisions they have made in the past. There are local and temporary…
❐ Highlights Highlights [...] when an object is reduced downwards to its physical subcomponents—for example, when a table is considered as a collection of atoms and subatomic particles—it is being undermined. When the opposite takes place—for example, when we ignore that the table is a thing in its own right, and instead refer to it by its table-effect on the human consciousness—it is overmined.…