Computer Scientist | International Chess Master
I briefly narrated how I accidentally stumbled upon a masterpiece of autobiography titled Becoming Myself in my now old essay on a Kubrick movie . I read the first chapters of the psychiatrist’s memoir from an e-book in 2022 – I suppose the most powerful one-third, as was suggested by the feedback given to Yalom himself in his literature group – and continued the remaining two-thirds slowly and…
My previous writing from almost two years ago had an influence on my life. I now ask questions: How drastic was that influence? What could I have done better? How could I reap all the benefits of publicizing my goals? Similarly, how can this writing not only aid me, but also be useful to a reader? An obvious first step in such a self-reflection is to go through the list of goals that I had set in…
Recently, I came across the Gaia hypothesis . It made me look at the Earth as a superorganism and not only: humans were a part of a bigger system; our planet, galaxy, and cosmos were parts of bigger systems, ordered in an hierarchical manner, serving for no purpose or for one purpose only: to destroy herself and rise up again from her own ashes. Everything moves in cycles of death and rebirth.…
When I turned 12, I had a chance to read Shakespeare. The volume I took from the library had five tragedies in it. The first two of them ( Romeo & Juliet and Othello ) I didn’t even bother reading, as I already knew how things were going to end (not so good). The third play was Hamlet , which was a fantastic read. There was also King Lear , which I remember being really good, although not as good…
Terry Gilliam is an amazing director. One of the greatest. Only a vision of a genius is capable of directing the movie called Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I see Hunter S. Thompson there and exclaim: look at that, what an interesting life! But then, more it is a really good narration rather than life. Crazy people are more interesting. But for Thompson there seemed to be no adventure, but an…
There are things in life worth striving for. For example, it would be nice to believe in your own incomparable uniqueness without getting narcissistic. Or be capable of living life at ease: as an old man who doesn’t mind to look stupid. How does one escape the idiotism of teenagehood? I don’t know. I couldn’t achieve that. But I sometimes tried to put myself in the shoes of an old man who is wise…
I was going through my old clutter of documents trying to sort them. I decided publish some of the short posts I had previously published on my old wordpress blog as notes. One of them is a slightly longer essay about Brazil , which I published on my writings page.
We can prove the existence of atoms, the smallest unit of matter, by mere logic, via reductio ad absurdum . Assume that matter can be divided infinitely. Then each of the infinitely many resulting parts must either have no magnitude or some magnitude. If the parts have no magnitude, then even an infinite number of them could never compose anything with a finite size: zero added infinitely many…
For some time, I find it difficult not to grow irritated by others’ behavior, especially when it seems unfair in relation to me. These are subtle, self-inflicted annoyances, and I do not carry them onto my next day. Still, I dislike the unrest of that particular day, or even of a single hour. Some time ago, inspired by Franklin’s autobiography, I replaced my habit goals with virtues. For instance,…
Instead of directly translating the ancient Greek word philotimia as amor honoris (love of honor) into Latin, the ancient Roman authors chose the closest equivalent, ambitio . Ambitio originally had a narrower meaning: going around canvassing for votes. By Cicero’s time, however, it could mean both zeal for glory and excessive striving . In the ancient Roman sense, it often meant the pursuit of…
After Bacon, we go back in time to the fourth century. Here we meet Aurelius Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, and The City of God . Saint Augustine analyzes ambition through the prism of Christianity and condemns it. Book five speaks of the ancient Roman ambition. In chapter xii, St. Augustine refers to Sallust, and explains that glory was what the Romans most ardently loved: they were greedy of…
Ambition – philotimia (φιλοτιμία), love of honor. Sometimes we praise ambitious men, because they love honor more than others; and sometimes we blame them, because they love honor more than is right. Ambition is a strong motivator for both noble and shameful political action. So there must be an unnamed mean, an intermediate state for ambition, which is worthy of praise. Aristotle doesn’t seem to…
What if, each day, I tackled a single virtue or vice and observed it in my own behavior. That would be a day worth spent. I search online for a translation of Aristotelian Ethics. Finding a good translator and classicist is half the job done. W.D. Ross. I need book iv, chapter iii, the term I look for is magnanimity. The translation is old-fashioned. The ancient Greek word megalopsychia…
In ancient Greece, moral virtue was tied to physical fitness. The phrase – kalos kagathos (καλὸς κἀγαθός, noun: kalokagathia) , translated as beautiful and virtuous, was used by classical authors (including Plato and Aristotle) to denote a perfect man. Mens sana in corpore sano is a later, Latin phrase, coined by the Roman poet Juvenal, and is known as a proverb: a healthy mind in a healthy body .…
I (very concisely) explain the fundamentals of getting good at chess: Learn the basics via lichess.org/learn or some other resource. Practice piece checkmates . Do not memorize openings or traps. There are only three opening principles: (a) control the center; pieces in the center attack more squares; all else equal, more squares under control means a better position, (b) rapidly develop many…
Dr. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs advises Clarice Starling to read Marcus Aurelius. Only a few people know that Aurelius’ meditations was not a book, but a note – a personal diary of the emperor who commanded the whole known world at the time. The last good Roman emperor’s diary, and Stoicism in general, is currently promoted a lot by Ryan Holiday and other entrepreneurs alike. The…
There are a few blogs I find useful and visit occasionally. Below is my curated list sorted alphabetically. Blogs may be active or dormant. I may be biased toward computer science. I may dislike and be against the ideas in some of their writings: andrej karpathy bartosz milewski chris olah eric s. raymond joel spolsky juergen schmidhuber leslie lamport michael nielsen nat eliason paul graham…
Testing out pin, tags, and image. Refreshing note publication dates dynamically now. Sharing still does not work properly.
Testing Notes. Didn’t want to open X or Threads account. Inspired by KQ . I will occasionally update or delete the notes. This format is proper for short writings.
Oxuyacağınız əlyazma babam Şahəliyev İsmayıl Əziz oğlu tərəfindən 2008-ci ildə qələmə alınmışdır. Yazılanların əksər hissəsini, xırda qrammatik və üslub düzəlişləri xaric, necə var, elə də təqdim edirəm. Müəllif, hüquq fakultəsində təhsil aldığı dövr (1966-1972) Mən doğulan ərəfədə adamlar çox geridə qalmış, primitiv həyat tərzi sürürdülər: kəndimiz savadsızlıq dövrünü yaşayırdı. Kiməsə aid bir…
The following material was initially prepared as a lecture for ENCE 3503: Data & Information Engineering (Fall 2024) course at ADA University. Data we wish to work with are rarely available (e.g. as a .csv file) suiting our needs. Often we need to be proactive and obtain data ourselves. We have vast amount of web resources for that, however, manually retrieving data is a slow and not scalable…
With the fallen zenith of the Summer sun, my reverence in front of books and great minds disappears. I realize that infinite questions, fruitless search for the meaning of life paralyze man, make him impotent to any action, and by keeping philosophers in high regard he demolishes his own greatness. Why did no one tell me that, I ask, the purpose of life was to act ? We read, but what we read isn’t…
Twenty-five is a mathematically precise moment to stop and reflect on life and beliefs. I used to hide myself from the outside world, but now that I realize how insecure all people are than what they reveal, I begin to put my shield down. With genuineness and honesty comes peace and comfort, and I am unleashed from the chains that suppress my soul. May the following lines help others to love me,…
Descartes said cogito ergo sum. I say you should publish your goals on your website so that public shame will force you to take action. Descartes and I have little in common. Academia Exactly one year ago, I made the most difficult choice of my life and switched my chess career to an academic one. It turned out to be a great decision: I have a wonderful job and I am not insecure or anxious about…
The Autodidact (Self-taught man), a character in the book of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea , has a system. He arrives at the library, takes a book and reads it. And the system is that he chooses his books in alphabetical order. I study him with a sort of admiration. What will-power he must have to carry through, slowly, obstinately, a plan on such a vast scale. One day, seven years ago (he told me he…
This is an essay of a very bad taste. I re-publish it for tracking the progress of my thinking over the year. My life changed in 2020 when I grabbed Stendhal’s Le Rouge off the shelf in an abandoned house. I had not read anything serious for a long time, and forcing myself to go past beyond the initial pages of the book eventually brought a snowball effect (read: Stendhal effect). For the first…
What is the purpose of arguing with another person? — reaching the truth or consensus . NOT winning the argument. NOT bringing the opposite side to your belief system. NOT belittling or ridiculing the other person. To reach consensus I have to listen carefully. It doesn’t mean that I should tolerate a fool’s lunacy, but if another person has certain rational reasons to believe in what they…
Image made by the author on canva.com Before Nineteen Eighty-Four , I had already read some of George Orwell’s essays: Why I Write (1946) and Politics and the English Language (1946), as well as the transcript of Literature and Totalitarianism (1941) — Orwell’s BBC broadcast, clearly illustrate how the idea of Nineteen Eighty-Four gradually emerged and was shaped throughout the years, reaching its…
Matthew Modine as Private James T. “Joker” Davis in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket “A curious emotion stirred in Winston’s heart. In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already he had instinctively started forward to help her. In the moment when he had seen her fall on the bandaged arm, it…
The Roman Emperor Vespasian was making tough and consequential decisions while being terminally ill in his bed. When his physician told him that it was negatively affecting his health, he said: “An emperor must die standing.” Montaigne writes about this in his essay Against Laziness and gives more examples of a man’s ability to selflessly concentrate on necessary tasks (usually concerning others)…