Category: rePosts

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rePost::Do What Defines You « Jonathan Zdziarski's Domain

Say it with me. Read the whole thing!!!

Do What Defines You
A friend of mine was going on about really knowing people; “people… are not defined by what they do”, he said. The point he was making was not to judge people by the cover of what they do in life. But the deeper point, that he may not have even realized, was the tragedy in the truth of that statement. How tragic it is that we aren’t what we do. It seems to me that, given the finite amount of time we have to live and become, that we spend more of our lives thinking about what we want to do than actually doing it.
I’m not talking about recreation. There are a lot of things we could do, but most of us have a shorter list of things we love to do. These are the things that give us purpose in life; they drive and define who we are, and we’d gladly choose them over the most expensive recreation. People refer to these higher things as passions or callings. I simply call doing the things that give us purpose, “living”. Using the term “living” seems like a misnomer, however, as people usually spend more of their life doing anything but these things. The average person will spend twenty or thirty years of their “life” doing all of the things they don’t want to do in hopes that one day they’ll earn enough money to buy back what they gave up in the first place: the time to live. But time is exactly what we don’t have a lot of. If anything is worth burning our lives out on, wouldn’t it be the things that define us and give our lives purpose?
via Do What Defines You « Jonathan Zdziarski’s Domain.

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rePost:: Show, Sort, Shill ::Overcoming Bias

Nice post. Read the whole thing!!!

The point of writing is to help others see, but what exactly do we help others see?  Consider:

  • Show – Show the world new ideas (or insights).
  • Sort – Attach quality signals to shown ideas.
  • Shill – Push ideas, via other sorts of influences.

Many new ideas or insights can be expressed clearly in just a few paragraphs.  Others may take a few pages; a few need whole books.  With more work, one can express ideas in different ways, for more chances to connect to different readers, and attach good descriptors and connections, so that folks searching for such things can find your idea.
The vast majority of intellectual effort, however, is not such “showing”, but instead “sorting” and “shilling.”  Advocates push ideas via repetition, celebrity endorsement, etc., pundits are witty, engaging, elegant, etc, and academics make impressive-looking math models, theorems, data collections, stat studies, prototypes, etc.
via Overcoming Bias : Show, Sort, Shill.

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rePost::Sleuthing uncovers the mystery of Kingston MicroSD cards' crappy QA Boing Boing

This post was cool!!!

Sleuthing uncovers the mystery of Kingston MicroSD cards’ crappy QA

By Cory Doctorow at 2:46 AM February 16, 2010

via Sleuthing uncovers the mystery of Kingston MicroSD cards’ crappy QA Boing Boing.

When Bunnie Huang was in South China overseeing production on his versatile ChumbyOne device, he discovered a major quality issue with Kingston’s MicroSD cards. At first, he assumed that he’d gotten a counterfeit batch, but further investigation proved them to be legit. Kingston wasn’t willing to give Bunnie any details on its QA process, so Bunnie did some amazing engineer-sleuthing on Kingston and its competitors’ MicroSD, and wrote up the results in a damning report that is one of the most fascinating accounts of everyday engineering I can remember reading. Bunnie Huang wrote the book on reverse engineering, literally, so he isn’t afraid to start dissolving memory cards’ encapsulant with acetone, or start comparing /sys entries to get comparative reads on the the electronic card ID data records. Posts like this make me want to be like Bunnie when I grow up.

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Better Class of Civil Servants::TSA forces travelling policeman to remove his disabled four-year-old son's leg-braces Boing Boing

This is why some people who has the means to travel to the US don’t.

TSA forces travelling policeman to remove his disabled four-year-old son’s leg-braces

By Cory Doctorow at 2:57 AM February 16, 2010

Philadelphia TSA screeners forced the developmentally delayed, four-year-old son of a Camden, PA police officer to remove his leg-braces and wobble through a checkpoint, despite the fact that their procedure calls for such a case to be handled through a swabbing in a private room. When the police officer complained, the supervising TSA screener turned around and walked away. Then a Philadelphia police officer asked what was wrong and “suggested he calm down and enjoy his vacation.”
via TSA forces travelling policeman to remove his disabled four-year-old son’s leg-braces Boing Boing.

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rePost::Foreign investors shunning Philippines: experts | ABS-CBN News Online Beta

If we are hard headed about this the huge remittances of Filipino overseas workers can be thought of as investment. We have a postive balance of payments, we need to marshal these resources and create a focused try at finding our comparative advantage and try to develop industries that we can be world leaders in.

Wallace said the Philippines had enjoyed low inflation and high international reserves and a stable balance of payments under Arroyo.
But he attributed this to the actions of the central bank and the huge remittances of millions of Filipinos working overseas.
He said most Asian countries, except small ones such as Cambodia and East Timor, were getting more foreign investment than the Philippines.
AYC Consultants economist Benvenuto Icamina said that, to attract more investment, the Philippines would need to revise certain “discriminatory taxation” policies that favor local companies over foreign ones.
He also said the country needed to upgrade and modernize its infrastructure while improving its governance and cutting “non-tariff barriers” such as red tape.
via Foreign investors shunning Philippines: experts | ABS-CBN News Online Beta.

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rePost::Congress appears doomed to fail on Jobs Creation Legislation | Angry Bear

This is my beef with a lot of the spending that politicians do with their Pork Barrel /IRA allotments etc. Few politicians seem to grasp that spending money on somethings are a better use of capital because it creates a value unlocking cycle to more investments/more revenues. This is why districts which have very narrow roads that are burdened with heavy traffic should be widened, and when you see a couple of projects to cover the basketball courts along the road whilst the narrowness of the road is not addressed. Well this is simply a failure in allocation. This is a simple example but we can see this in various degrees in most congressional districts/ provinces and cities in the Philippines. We have a fucking budget deficit because of a few things. One being corruption and the other being a failure in allocation. If I can credit GMA with anything is that she seems to understand this. Hence a lot of development in places like bohol,cebu,cagayan de oro, davao and a host of other places.  A flawed analogy would be using your money to get into trainings. If you use your money to train in skills that are marketable or have value you have used you money well, while if you use your money to train for personal enjoyment you gain in happiness but you didn’t increase your value (If your strict about this you increased your value but tangentially).

What should Congress be doing instead? It should be thinking of public infrastructure and human capital projects that provide3 support to important public institutions that will last long beyond the current Recession. Congress should be funding public transit and renewable energy projects that would directly put to work hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans. Another important public infrastructure project that would make a real difference in unemployment? How about providing 1-2 billion apiece to the ten largest inner cities to be used for urban renewal–destruction of ruined buildings, building of public transit and energy projects–with the requiremment that at least 75% of the employees be from the city itself. Detroit's mayor has said that tehre aare 10,000 buildings that need to be pulled down in the city. That would be great work for unskilled laborers and make a marvelous dent in uhemployment. And it should be providing another stimulus packagge for the states to support education from K-16 and beyond–the best investment we can make in keeping our US universities and schools great, keeping educators employed, and offering ordinary Americans the chance to better themselves through educational advancement.
Just imagine. What if Congress would have the courage to discuss these issues publicly? Quit thinking about their corporatist patrons? Start thinking about ordinary Americans? And actually fund public infrastructure and human capital support over the next two years.
via Congress appears doomed to fail on Jobs Creation Legislation | Angry Bear.

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Why do antidepressants work only for the deeply depressed? A neuroskeptical look : Neuron Culture

I think it’s representative of the mindset prevalent today that a pill can cure what ails us. It’s the fast food mentality to everything. Want to get rich just join this. Want to get fit just do this. Want to get girls just follow these steps.
For the record I am convinced with the evidence for clinical depression. Heck DFW died because his meds no longer affected his brain the way it used to. It’s just that when we should be dealing with our insecurities, our fears etc we take the easy way out and go for the meds.
I remember a Big Bang Theory episode where Sheldon’s sister visits him and she likes rajesh but the anti anxiety drug that rajesh took to combat his problems conversing with women come to mind.
NOTE(DFW David Foster Wallace wikipedia link here but I’m too lazy)

Why do antidepressants work only for the deeply depressed? A neuroskeptical look

Posted on: January 26, 2010 8:11 PM, by David Dobbs

Neuroskeptic ponders the growing evidence that antidepressants significantly best placebo only in the more (or most) depressed patients. His take is that:
antidepressants treat classical clinical depression, of the kind that psychiatrists in 1960 would have recognized. This is the kind of depression that they were originally used for, after all, because the first antidepressants arrived in 1953, and modern antidepressants like Prozac target the same neurotransmitter systems.
via Why do antidepressants work only for the deeply depressed? A neuroskeptical look : Neuron Culture.

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rePost::Coming to terms with the final chapter – Books – Entertainment – smh.com.au

Remember that smash film Got To Believe In Magic with Rico Yan and Claudine Barreto?, Rico Yan’s character initially had trouble thinking he’d get old. I ‘m somewhat similar because I can’t imagine being old.
In some ways there is that thought of dying til you can no longer enjoy life. I don’t know. I salute Terry Pratchett’s courage in admitting to this arrangement.

Coming to terms with the final chapter

February 12, 2010
Fantasy author Terry Pratchett mulls over life and how to leave it, writes Sacha Molitorisz.
Terry Pratchett … ‘‘I’ll write in the coffin, too.
As in a well-plotted fantasy novel, life is full of surprises. Until recently, Sir Terry Pratchett was one of Britain’s best-selling authors, a comic fantasist best known for his Discworld series.
Two years ago, he announced he has early onset Alzheimer’s. Now, at 61, Pratchett has courted controversy by admitting he wants to choose when he dies.
”I have no desire to pop my clogs in the next few years,” he says from his home.
”But I don’t particularly want to spend a lot of time in bed being fed through a tube. That’s what my father said, too. He didn’t want to die that way but then he had to.”
Pratchett presented his argument for assisted suicide last week, while delivering a lecture for the BBC, saying: ”I would like to die peacefully before the disease takes me over.
”If I knew that I could die at any time I wanted then suddenly every day would be as precious as a million pounds. If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice.”
They were dignified, considered words. Even so, Pratchett expected all hell to break loose. To his surprise, it didn’t. ”Some archbishops have said nasty things but I look on that as a plus,” he says, lucidly and softly.
”Apart from that, not a single person has thumbed their nose at me. People are saying, ‘How can we join in?
”The baby boomers see how their grandmothers and grandfathers died, and they’re looking after their mums and dads, and they think, ‘Bugger this, who said it has to be like this?”’
via Coming to terms with the final chapter – Books – Entertainment – smh.com.au.

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rePost::Martian Settlers May Need Chickens To Conquer The Red Planet | Universe Today

This would be an interesting site to behold multiple phds with great physical conditions farming.

If humanity ever intends upon on settling Mars (by settling I mean a one way trip with no plans on returning back to Earth), they are going to need a whole lot of chickens if they want to survive–let alone thrive–upon the red planet.
Aside from providing an excellent source of protein, chickens could help future settlers raise not only crops (such as wheat, barely, etc.) upon the barren Martian soil, but also help colonists keep the lights on through a very useful by-product (aka chicken dung).
Unlike Earth, Martian dirt is very hostile towards plant life. Unless we can genetically alter plants to grow upon the red planets soil, future settlers will have to heavily rely upon the home world for their daily bread.
via Martian Settlers May Need Chickens To Conquer The Red Planet | Universe Today.