Everything else...
“Make for yourself a definition or description of the thing which is presented to you, so as to see distinctly what kind of a thing it is in its substance, in its nudity, in its complete entirety, and tell yourself its proper name, and the names of the things of which it has been compounded, and into which it will be resolved. For nothing is so productive of elevation of mind as to be able to examine methodically and truly every object that is presented to you in life, and always to look at things so as to see at the same time what kind of universe this is, and what kind of use everything performs in it, and what value everything has with reference to the whole.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, iii. 11.
“There is such a thing as nonnerdy applied mathematics: find a problem first, and figure out the math that works for it (just as one acquires language), rather than study in a vacuum through theorems and artificial examples, then change reality to make it look like these examples.”
— Antifragile - Nicholas Taleb
“Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make it worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.”
— Antifragile - Nicholas Taleb
“It is not well advertised that there is no evidence that abilities in chess lead to better reasoning off the chessboard - even those who play blind chess games with an entire cohort can’t remember things outside the board better than a regular person. We accept the domain-specificity of games, the fact that they do not really train you for life, that there are severe losses in translation. But we find ti hard to apply this lesson to technical skills acquired in school, that is, to accept the crucial fact that what is picked up in the classroom stays largely in the classroom.”
— Antifragile - Nicholas Taleb
pilgrimstudios:
The Big Brain Theory: Pure Genius premieres tonight on Discovery Channel! 10pm, be there or be square.
psh, Olin alum., NBD
Weekend
It kind of sucks that I don’t have any pictures, but this last weekend was pretty great. On Thursday, Chris and I went to the Design and Manufacturing Convention. There were a bunch of machine shops, some robot companies, and just a bunch of interesting suppliers. Friday night was Man Hall’s Thrift Shop Party. Saturday, we went to the Robot Zoo at the Cambridge Science Festival. Robots and kids everywhere! That night was Olin’s Formal at the NERD center. From there we drove up to Vermont to pick up some shotguns. Got there at 3 am, slept, and woke up at 9 am to drive back down to meet up with Ethan and his friends to go shooting. Unfortunately I didn’t get much in the form of work done, but I had a lot of fun. :]
“Attacking femaleness, deriding ‘girly stuff’ and rolling your eyes at ‘women’s issues’ declaring yourself a ‘tomboy’ who gets along better with men because women are silly or pretty or whatever these are expressions of internalized sexism. If that’s the way you feel about your own sex you’ll be doomed to feel inferior no matter what you achieve in life.”
—
Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (via -jamesfrancospenis)
Well, this post made me horribly uncomfortable.
For at least a day.
Then I read it again.
(Source: an-otaco)
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