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(Actually, I researched this a few days ago, but still wanted to share).
Why this is Important?
We’re 70% H20 (Hey roughly the same proportion of water as the earth!). Water is in all our cells, in our blood, in our brain, in our organs. The water we drink touches every cellular nuance of our body. Fuel in a car only touches the engine. The petrol people put into motors (for buses or trains or automobiles) (I don’t use cars, obviously) touches the motor and the exhaust pipe. The petrol doesn’t effect the seats, interior, chassis, wheels, axel nor any of the other parts of mechanical transportation. Water, however does. Whatever effects our feet, our skin, the vitreous fluid in our eyeballs has water in it; our blood-oxygen exchange components (capillaries) in our lungs contain and are immersed in water. If you dent a car bumper or puncture a tire, the petrol put into the automobile is irrelevant. Human bodies are not cars (obviously!). When you cut yourself (like an epidermal minor laceration or abrasion) the blood platelets that rush to seal that and heal that gash and the blood and the skin and every component of your body contains and is effected by the quality of water you drink. Every miniscule or large component of our body has water in it. Therefore, the quality of water we drink effects every part of our body. The quality of water you drink seriously effects how efficiently your body physiologically functions. Toxic water can distort and discombobulate your physiology, whereas pure water can detoxify and is the best “fuel” possible for optimal clarity, productivity, success, fitness, energy, and focus.
The Types of “Pure” Water
There’s only two types of “pure” (95-99% pure) water: reverse osmosis and distilled. “Spring” water may have trace impurities or minerals in it and charcoal filtered water has many particles that are small enough to pass through the filters.
Reverse osmosis pushes water through a membrane away from the solutes (water is the solvent). In normal osmosis, water (the solvent) moves towards the solutes to create equilibrium in the solution (i.e. water is dispersed around the solutes). Reverse osmosis works by using a lot of pressure to push the water through a membrane and most all solutes are left behind, resulting in 95-98% pure water.
Distilled water is purified through evaporation. The water turns to vapor and practically all solutes are left behind before the vapor condenses back into water. Distilled water is usually around 99% pure, but can occasionally have different types of minute impurities (that would not pass through a reverse osmosis membrane), and is very often more expensive than reverse osmosis water.
Overall, you can’t go wrong with reverse osmosis nor distilled water.
This article was extremely well-written and clear, more clear than medical texts (which delusionally and incorrectly often suggest water “with minerals” is healthy. That’s ridiculous. Water should be pure and clean. Take vitamins or eat minerals from healthy vegetables. Do not “get minerals” from water!”
Final Tips
It’s strange. When people travel they say to “watch out for the bad water”. I feel I am traveling in the United States because out of Costa Rica, Mexico, Australia, and France, I have encountered the most poisonous, toxic, dangerous, (and diarhea-causing) water in the United States. Maybe that means I’m at home in those other places and traveling in the States. Who knows, but what matters is clean water. After a toxic experience with rust-filled water I will aim to remember to carry a TDS Meter. With that you can measure the ppm (parts per million) of solutes in the water (water is the solvent, but drinking water shouldn’t be a heterogenous/homogenous solution at all, just H20!).
Set a Threshold
Set a maximum TDS reading of what you will drink. It’s your body. You should demand a maximum threshold of pollution you will physiologically allow! When I was drinking water saturated with rust and manganese, you feel groggy and a bit lost. I will never drink water over 200ppm (and that’s a liberal thredhold)!
Something spectacular occurred to me after a few hours of meticulous frustration. I was touching up a portion of my material_items_all list and got stuck on a hygiene component. Specifically a hygiene-travel items. I looked up exactly what was the TSA aviation regulation for non-flammable fluids and, appealing to a precise side of me, was satisfied with the 100ml/3.4oz container limit. I then realized I had a bunch of empty unused bottles that after cleaning and removing their labels (5-hour energy, old Whiteboard spray bottle, and a few others like even an old spice container) I could now use for my hygiene travel needs (optionally for mouthwash, hand-sanitizer, lotion, aftershave, deodorant-fluid, hair gel, woah 6!).
I then had two huge realizations after struggling for two hours deciding if I should label each bottle’s size (30ml/1oz for an old poison ivy bottle to be used for hand sanitizer, or like 60ml/2oz for the 5-hour energy bottles for mouthwash and lotion) and the proper label for each:
They are really big realizations.
When You Remove the Label from Products Magically Good Things Happen
The items start to feel like video game items (that don’t have tons of small print on them)
You enjoy the products more. I’ve loved JIF peanut butter since I was a kid and tried a huge variety of highly expensive and exotic forms of peanut butter but just always like JIF creamy, boring, cheap, good. But when I took the label off the large jug, I was able to enjoy it more. This sounds preposterous but it psychologically-gustatorially “tasted better”! I think the psychology behind this is, quite simply is a small miniscule part of your brain sees that product (I’ll continue with the peanut butter example) and instead of seeing JIF and getting confused on if it’s supposed to be advertising that product (because after all, those flashy-colored product labels make advertising the product modular. In your own home it’s like someone’s pantry or fridge is a walking commercial advertisement with all the labels). So you stop advertising the product (in a very small, but centering and uplifting way) when you remove the labels from things. Try it. It’s really cool.
The Actual Product(s) are Strange!
After cleaning and trying to accurately label the metric volume and identifying label of the containing substance of travel bottles, I realized that it was all just fluids. If I put all those fluids in identical bowels, I ‘d have
clear gelatinous plasma-like stuff (hair gel)
soupier clear plasma-like stuff (hand-sanitizer)
blue fluid (mouthwash)
yellowish fluid (aftershave)
white plasma-like substance (lotion)
blue fluid (deodorant fluid, really after shave but I use it for spray)
They’re just chemicals! They’re just chemistry, chemicals, fluids. They’re gelatinous or viscous or non-viscous or fluid. That was shocking to me because I’d always purchased and recognized “Listerine Cool Mint” in that recognizable bottle or “Crew Hair Gel in that Brown Bottle” and those advertising containers and labels was how I interacted with the product. This sounds preposterous (but hey it works for me!) when I put mouthwash in my cleaned-out clear cylinder mini (previously for spices) bottle, it tasted better and I remembered to use mouthwash when I needed, creating better dental hygiene, fresher breath, and increased “clean” enjoyment.
I think a small cognitive part of the brain feels enslaved using and looking at these products sometimes multiple times a day. When you remove the label, you realize that most of these are just substances, chemicals. This is fascinating. All those expensive ointments and chemicals, those companies just make a single mixture, a heterogenous or homogenous mixture solution sometimes with solvents and solutes but it’s just a mixture!
It was just astounding to see how much of my life is working with these different colored, different textured mixtures or pastes (peanut butter is paste-like).
I was also astounded that I had never really properly figured out the TSA minimum requirement, always did guesswork, and almost always frustratingly had some substance confiscated. So after NOT traveling withing TSA regulations and not traveling with proper planning for so many years it was perplexing to realize I could’ve done this so many years ago and saved myself headache.
I just finally thought out the causality of it. Almost every time I flew I’d have to not have toothpaste or not have some substance that I need or find a pharmacy and purchase an overpriced odd version of that same fluid or substance. I questioned the actual need of some of those substances (the lotion I need because I get dry skin, the after-shave I need so I don’t get a rash, I could probably get by without the hand-sanitizer although that’s good hygiene, and the mouthwash I could just use toothpaste instead, but it is nice to have and the fluid deodorant I probably wouldn’t have to bring). But in labeling those, I realized two things:
I didn’t want to relabel the substance with a brand. I labeled my newly cleaned white spray bottle to be used for aftershave “Brut”. That was idiotic because, yes, that’s my favorite type of aftershave, but it was re-advertising the product. If I like something, I want to merely use it, not have to bloody be a walking advertisement for gobs of products (and in a sense, any of your who don’t remove labels are, indeed, advertising those products!) I guess there’s nothing wrong if you like the product and brand but it detracts from other experiences I think. So I did want to label it something to identify it with and decided on the size of the container (60ml/2oz in that example) and short-hand for the container substance and decided on TRAVEL-AS for AfterShave. Marvelous. That’s all I would ever need for a label. I went through this hellish experience of labeling drawers and cabinets of an apartment I disliked in a city I disliked (Calabasas, too close to Los Angeles, a city I find putrid and disgusting, another hard-earned lesson) and then not using the labels for what they said they would contain. So I’d already had a lesson on the fact that I didn’t like labels that much . I much rather prefer seeing the substance (like the translucent glass mouthwash bottle), but for these non-translucent bottles I wanted to have some non-restricting informative label and decided on the abbreviated substance type and the volume of the container. Actually useful.
It was like I was creating my own hotel travel. I realized I was creating contraptions a little like one would find in a hotel. So where I was staying sort of felt hotel-like. I then realized some pretty interesting things would arise if I did Pretend Travel. I’d discover what worked and didn’t work out of travel items and could troubleshoot those and if I could not feel out of place using travel items, I would be feel a good balance with travel and not travel.
Conclusively, ways I benefited from trying to properly label travel bottles:
I could feel like I was traveling at the place where I normally stay and also, conversely, feel like I’m at the place where I normally stay while traveling staying at some different place by being organized and having simple well-tested familiarity with my (selectively few)travel items.
The global terror of the marketing-capitalist-consumer death cycle is so much pollution goes into these useless, annoying, mobile-self-advertising-labeled-contraptions (bottles for example), that usually (unless you’re a resourceful productivity person like me and re-use “Free” bottles or contraptions for quality organizing things) people discard. Some of it gets recycled which is great, but it’s refreshing (and uplifting) to think what it would be like if everyone just decided on the best form of a product and then just gave out or sold that one product (which was at the time, scientifically the best, a lot like open-source code for things in real life, non computer things) WOW!
Having a travel list items of everything (especially clusters of items that people usually think of at the last minute, like hygiene items) in a way that provides ease, simplicity, and functionality makes travel almost like what’s going on all the time, or never occurring. In other words, being ridiculously well-organized with functional items makes travel occurring all the time in a non-problematic way or never occurring because you’re always at a state of peace. This is redefining the whole word of travel for me, too. Language is feeling a bit muddled. Okay, back to something useful like programming!
First off, before you go about getting your treasure tome novel or thousand-paged tech manual or non-fiction masterpiece decorated with ISBN’s and the like, you need to write it! I recommend self-publishing and this true gem of an article on formatting in Word</a> is exquisitely well-written, concise, and comprehensively details how to properly format an entire book written in MS Word, but that said I would highly recommend Libre Office instead as the best word-processing software. Libre Office is cross-platform, it’s free, it always works, and it’s got a seamless interface with a lot of interesting features.
But that said, another alternative to this madness is using CSS to format your “book” and put it up as a website for people to visit and browse (to which you could it set it up for them to subscribe) and/or earn off advertising. There exists extremely-well-written (“book-worthy”) articles free on the net on their own sites and the “gem formatting article” mentioned above is one of such type.
So there exist numerous options for publishing your books (be them novels, non-fiction, expository, or technical). Probably the most old-fashioned is the paper-based publishing method. This is unnecessarily expensive, clunky, obnoxious, involves dozens of people you don’t need, and take forever. Then there’s self-publishing in word or libre office and then distributing your book electronically. Finally, the way that has the most control is you format your “book” using CSS and upload it as articles to a polished site to which people could “subscribe” or upon which you could link up advertising for income. It’s important to earn from your book. You don’t want to be writing valuable work and then just chucking it up for free. I’ve done that and at first it’s delightful with a buzz of completing something great, but eventually you need to earn from it. The second option combined with the third (self-publishing to ebook) and then releasing samples in well-structured sites of your own sounds the most polished for sure!
ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number. It is a 10-digit (composed only of numbers) indicator that identifies each version of a book, the book’s publisher(s), and regional grouping. Ebooks, (the deplorable) paperbased books, and all formally published documents require an ISBN number. Like credit card numbers, certain segments of the ISBN indicate various bits of information about the published document.
These include:
Group or Country Identifier – identifying a cluster of geographically or regionally defined publishers
Publisher Identifier – which identifies a specific single publisher from the Group/Country identifier
Title Identifier – this identifies the specific book title, version, or format (amazingly books in, for example, .epub and .mobi formats require distinct ISBNS! But all except the Title identifier portion of the ISBN in such an instance will likely be identical if the .mobi and .epub versions are published under the same country identifier and publisher identifier.
Note: this is mainly for books that have already been published in paper-based format. If you publish straight to ebook, you bypass tons of this junk and often don’t need an ISBN.
Check Digit – the final single 0-9 digit at the end of every 10-digit ISBN that does some kind of ISBN validation.
Fast Facts About ISBNs
Processing Time. After your application is received by one of the 160 worldwide reviewing agencies, it takes about 15 days to get an ISBN.
Cost. A non-refundable service processing fee is contained on each ISBN application.
Reusing an ISBN. Once you acquire your ISBN, it can never be reused even for a different edition. Different editions require different ISBNs! A slight headache, but a useful encouraging mechanism to make your document (ebook) polished before getting an ISBN!
New ISBNs. Naturally, it’s easy to mathematically calculate how the 10-digit ISBN limit will be reached by total number of ISBNs, so a new ISBN-13 standard was created in 2007, composed of 13 digits.
BareBones Step-by-Step Process for Getting an ISBN
Fill out application.
Receive assigned ISBN.
Report ISBN to R.R. Bowker (the database for the ISBN Agency).
Submit the title information to the Books in Print database. Get a free listing in Books in Print, Words on Cassette, The Software Encyclopedia, Bowker’s Complete Video Directory, and the like. (Note receiving the ISBN and not submitting the book and ISBN to the database would be like getting the stamp and envelope and not sending it. You must manually submit the book title after receiving the ISBN.
TL;DR
Apply
Receive ISBN
Submit book title and ISBN to Books in Print database
ISBN Agencies
This is slightly more complex, but not too much. Regional clusters have their own main ISBN agencies. U.S. Bowker (HQed in New Jersey) receives the most title and publisher information, so in a way it is (at least quantitatively) a major source of bibliogrphic information. However, Thorpe-Bowker is the ISBN agency for places like Australia and New Zealand. Additionally, Bowker UK serves Europe, Africa, Middle East, and Asia. (so if you’re focused on aus and nz publishing, Thorpe-Bowker would be the database). This is interesting because one normally thinks of the Publisher as the “top of the food chain” in regards to document distribution, but to Bowker, publishers are customers! Interesting. Not sure if I personally like what seems to be one company having a monopoly on this. In any case, that’s crucial information for ISBN Agencies.
Things are easy once you know how to accomplish them, aren’t they?
This is easily one of the most important posts (out of over 500) that I have ever written and recorded. As someone who has suffered from chronic indecision and the consequential doubt and incapacitation caused by indecision, this is one of my most personally helpful posts, but anyone will benefit from this. Even if you consider yourself freakishly decisive already, this will at the very least remind you of why it’s so insanely essential to avoid indecision at all costs; never engage indecision. Indecision is worse than producing or “finishing” with something sub par. Indecision is worse than procrastination; it is more devastating than being over-critical or undisciplined; indecision is wretched.
“The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.”
- Maimonides quote (Spanish Philosopher, 1135-1204)
“Indecision is the seedling of fear.” – Napoleon Hill
Havoc Caused by Indecision (for me Personally)
Uncertainty on which paper-based books to discard, which led to clutter.
Uncertainty on book drafts which caused me to scrap and overlook hundreds of pages of decent or quality writing.
I can’t stand indecision! I can’t afford to be indecisive! I loathe and hate how much time I’ve wasted with indecision. Can you relate to that?
Look at What Indecision Wrecks and Destroys
Future. Indecision prevents from occurring the good future resultant things caused by making the decision
Present. Indecision clogs the present with enervating, draining, infectious havoc.
So indecision annihilates the present and blockades you from the future! Indecision is wretched. It’s “waiting”. Indecision is toxic delay and waiting.
One great solution is let’s use a previous NLP concept I invented, “PIVOT” to dissolve indecision.
Eradicate Indecision
Here’s a few more insights into dissolving indecision.
Move Towards Decisiveness. Thing about all the uplifting awesome future privileges and abilities that are on pause by not having made that decision.
Move Away from Indecision. Indecision puts on pause your future. How much longer do you want to feel stuck, wallowing in the quicksand of indecision?
Transcend Decision. There’s no decisions; just actions. Make calculated actions and get out of the “pros” and “cons” of decision-making loops. Recognize that you eventually take an action to get out of a decision, so just make calculated actions.
Deliberate Imperfection. Be imperfect! Make imperfect decisions! Perfection is a curse and striving for it is almost always inextricably related to indecision! So being imperfect deliberately, will accelerate you to experience actions and decision, then if you want, later you can improve quality but improving quality is not gut-wrenchingly incapacitating like indecision.
Cut and Slice Away. In many of the books I’ve written I mention decision. In one book I dissect that “decide” is literally (directly) from Latin “decidere” which literally (exactly) means “to cut off”. So don’t look at decisions as this absurdly idiotic, preposterous and useless stream of “evaluating” or “looking at options”, or “looking at what’s best?!”, or ruminating on pros and cons. No, No, No. Bloody friction’ hell, no! Decision is slicing. You have an outrageously sharp blade. Millions of times sharper than a japanese katana (some of the sharpest blades in the world). You use that to cut, to slice things away. There are no more decisions. There are no more evaluations of options. You no longer examine what’s best. You cut, slice, and “cut away”. You achieve. You experience the future and the present is uplifting.
All descriptions of the movements on this page are the sole property and work of John Thomas Kooz. Originally this page was simply a list of all the music that appeared in audio blog snippets (as intros or outros usually) around the Validate Your Life Network, but I have extended it so that it has more utility. Now this page can be used for identifying classical music pieces! Ever since “classical music” replaced “card and coin tricks” of my Cs of hobbies it had been a major goal to identify a dozen or so quality, essential classical music pieces, and there movements, by ear. A bit of backstory in the “Cs of hobbies” bit: I had three Hobbies that began with the letter C: Computers, Chess, and Card tricks; as you will see in the 10 Card, 10 Coin Tricks post, Computers became career, Chess remained a great hobby, and Card tricks was completely replaced (I outgrew it) with classical music. So the selections that I would like to identify by ear are what follows. Quite usefully, links to the actual music are provided as well as some optional biographical or fact-based information about the composer and/or the piece. This page now has utility in my project of identifying specific classical music pieces by ear and serves me well in that regard. If you have an interest in a similar project, I trust this page will serve your ears as well! I have dissected all twelve of the pieces I want to identify by ear and for each movement have scrupulously detailed acoustic patterns that can be used to “describe” a movement as to better mnemonically recall and then later identify each masterpiece. A rich vocabulary easily and naturally emerges when describing classical masterpieces, I have discovered. For shits and giggles I sequenced these in reverse-era sequence, meaning that the baroque pieces are last and the nationalist-modernist pieces are first. They have been meticulously sequenced in reverse chronological order of premiere day of each piece. (Pieces we’ve already covered are in bold. This list may change.)
Nationalist (Czech): Smetana Moldau
Nationalist (Czech): Dvorak Cello Concerto in B. (Written 1894. Premiered 1896.)
Nationalist (English): Gustov Holst The Planets
Nationalist (French): Debussy Dialog du la Vent et la Mer
Nationalist (Russian): Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring
This piece (and this movement) is challenging to describe. It never gets eerie, nor dreary. It’s not particulary sad at times. At certain times it sounds like flickers of something Asian. It’s almost jazz-like I think in that it’s “behind the notes”. It’s very subtle. Compared to the loud boom, clash, electrifying explosions in Beethoven’s 9, it is incredibly subtle and discrete. I notice at times a similarity to somethign fluid, like Smetana’s Moldau, something river-like. It’s possible, considering both Dvorak and Smetana are from the same Czech region that the “river flow” theme may be present in both of their work or it could just be something I discerned personally. This piece is soothing but with a slight edge. It never gets ominous and I think I’m realizing precisely what I’m “hearing” in this piece. In the first movement of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, the sound and the tension “just reaches” certain descriptions like it just becomes jazz-like or just almost becomes ominous or just almost becomes victorious or just almost becomes tranquil…but doesn’t. Instead of this beign frustrating, it comes across as smooth and transitional and soothing. There are a few twirly moments of the cello, but it is never “happy”, it’s also never “ominous”, its smooth and subtle and almost shadowy I would say but always good. These adjectives may be meaningless to someone else but they assit in developign an acoustic recognizable relationship with the piece, which is quite joyful.
Listen to the AudioBlog/Podcast for Movements 2 and 3!
Basically at 2;48 means business etc, yearning fragile (?), subtle. Quiet brass introduces movement 3 at 6:00.
Given that increase of understanding results in decrease of fear (and vice versa),
Then an increase of understanding results in an increase of love (the opposite of fear) (and vice versa).
This is an interesting equation. But it proves that because atheists more often understand nuances of nature (the xylem and phloem support structure of trees, the astronomical nautical caclulations of civil, nautical, and astronomical twilight associated with a sunrise or sunset, or the biological complexity of some beautiful or interesting or lovable (like felis catus) species of nature), they therefore experience much more love, and therefore appreciation of nature than religiosu people (who choose to waste their minds comprehending lies, instead). So there’s my proof of how and why atheists, in fact, on average experience much more appreciation, beauty, and love for Nature than the most devout religious dolt!
What I Am and Am Not Criticizing About Religion
Just to be clear, about religion, I am condemning, critizing, apalled and disgusted by:
Mass Delusion – How religion programs people into infectious cognitive delusions about the truth of the planet, universe, and natural laws of science
Genocidal Murder – How religion directly is responsible for the deaths of millions in genocidal slayings like the Holocaust or the Crusades
Physical Abuse – How religion causes grievous bodily harm to countless peole in the form of stonings, genital mutilation, crucifiction, and other forms of obscenely grotesque and inhuman forms of torture and physical abuse.
Perpetuation of Irrational Phobic Fear – How religion (and perpetuators of the virus of religion) inculcate children at offensively young ages, teaching them to fear hell, and the wrath of a non-existent skygod.
Toxic Diversion from Evolution and Advancement – How religion betrays our ingenuity and misdirects the efforst of humans away from breakthrough discoveries and inventions which slow down our entire species.
Intentionally Distorting the Truth – How religion is fictitious, religion is merely inflated grandized mythology, but maintains the illusion of it being something other than pure fiction.
That’s quite an impressive list of counts for someone to put religion on trial (which, to any reasonably clear mind, it stands no chance). However, I should mention a few things of religion that I am not criticizing:Religion as a Galvanizer for Good – Anything that gets people to do something very good and generous (like charitable donations, or altrustic helpful volunteer work, given that it is economically compassionately feasible) is usually a good thing. Usually things like actually seeing the starving children, or observing the geological global warming malfunctions, or having a desire to help simply because of one’s own emotions instead of out of fear of the fiery pits of hell or because of wanting to “look good” for some mythological skygod, are better incentives for doing good, but if religion gets people to do good then I wouldn’t praise it for that (because much more good would be accomplished without religion, that’s a fact, and it’s optimal to do good for moral reasons of generosity related to logical calculations like the aforementioned observation of something destroyed (like rain forests, like health) and wanting to make an effort in assisting or changing that (but without playing god!) instead of religious-prompted reasons, but if religion, in its delusionally wayward and fear-driven way gets a person to do something very good, that isn’t as good as the person doing good for themselve, naturally, but I wont’ be critical of that aspect of religion.
This is a fine line, however, because when people go preaching: “I’m doing xyz charitable act for n skygod of my choice”. Said religious fanatics are prosetylizing, and encroaching, and subjugating others to fallacious drivel. That’s not good. People who do good without the prompting of religion (yes, actually naturally doing good), do so in much more private, and therefore wholistic patterns. People who do good because of religion often do so in a way that is egregiously detached from volition (in other words, they choose to take an action in a way that isn’t really related to them or their choice-making or their own action-taking); so that “egregious detachment of volition’ (as I just coined) is barely recognizable as valid generosity because it’s almost like not an actual person, but an automaton following a protocol of deified illusory commands to do something generous. So if you examine the means, the process of giving, I’d still be condeming religion (for producing an egregiously detached voltion with charity), but if you merely examine the ends, the outcome, the penultimate act of doing something helpful or generous, that miniscule aspect of religion is barely acceptable.
If I were a vicious, clever, and serious enough lawyer (I hold no legal credentials) I would sue the pants off this company: Sergeant. More specifically, Sergeant’s Pet Care Products. They have caused in a few instances, the deaths of many pets, and in many, many instances a slew of worried pet-human-friends panicked about what to do with their pet that is twitching and undergoing convulsions. It’s true that not “that many” pets die from this, but if you look up the brand Sergeant + Convulsant + Pet you will see what I’m talking about. This company should have been sued, shutdown, and punitive measures should have been taken after the first 50 instances of this. Unbelievably, in some sketch places in the world, you can still find this harmful topical! There’s probably a 40% chance that it will put your feline or canine friend into a convulsant spasm where it can’t walk and may actually die.
Those who are intelligent must tread a fine line to achieve success because the average majority status quo will ridicule, belittle, and humiliate them because of their own insecurity.
If you are intelligent you must be wary of the status quo average people, for they will ridicule, chide, and try to injure you; the mediocrity aims to keep others mediocre.
The imbeciles of the world are trapped in their own patterns thinking they are glorious (timboj ezra thinking they’re blegh with restaurant rubbish). If you’re intelligent, chuckle to yourself and do your work which is superior.
Reading Dawkins is unquestionably, undeniably, energizing! The man’s writing is genuinely Energizing, uplifting, and makes me happy. Good to know the wise still exist!
The clarity from reading one who has taken such fastidious and meticulous successful effort to explain interworkings of biology and evolution as Dawkins has gives my entire week a boost of energy and alignment.
Reading Dan King (a british chessmaster) and Dawkins (a british atheist, author, and ethologist) is aligning. British authors have kept me lucid and safe my entire life regardless of geographical location.
Even when surrounded by prosetyizling dunderheads in Costa Rica, I was reading a brit (Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night time). Again, when immersed in religious cult people I clung to Douglas Adams. British authors have been like Oxygen and Light during the times I was amongst suffocating bogs of obfuscation and confused, lost people.
Without the alignment from British authors (through my entire life from Dahl to Douglas Adams to Dawkins) I wouldn’t be alive; I would have perished in the muck and confusion of the rest of the world.
British Authors have always been the helping hand to the drowning swimmer; always the Light in vicinity of darkness; the joy amidst horrors; I shudder to think how lost I would be had I never found authors such as Dawkins and Douglas Adams.
If you’re hyper-intelligent it’s best to avoid most people because the average status quo is apt to ridicule, laugh at, or hinder the intelligent, rather than accept their inferiority.
The intelligent people do not laugh at those less intelligent; it is out of insecurity that the average status quo dunderhead will laugh, ridicule, and aim to injure the intelligent.
I finally am at peace with being very intelligent in some areas. You should be at peace with your own intelligence as well.
A Truism I crafted that anyone can say to anyone: “I may be naive in some areas, but in other areas I have unfathomably more wisdom than you.”
That was in addition to 10 bloody horses! All those pets (minus the horses) roamed freely throughout the house! Obviously Byron liked animals and the companionship and the ability to observe natural fauna in his abode. It’s quite likely some of those little (or big) critters sparked some of the content of his poetry. However, having such a multitude of pets is indicative of a strong belief. Something abnormal (but enjoyable to one person) is indicative of that person having undergone great efforts to “install” that thing in their life. No one would ever accumulate such a multitude and such a diverse variety of four-legged, two-legged, winged, crawling, scurrying, grooming, purring and barking fauna if they did not have a higher belief and committed themselves to installing that. You dont’ just stumble upon all those pets; that takes some resolute certainty of some higher belief and interest. As much as I love animals (especially feline friends), this post is not about pets nor animal companions, but rather installing important and unique things in one’s life.
Minimalism
I remember when I had closed the apartment (idiotically, instead of permanently eliminating the rubbish, I put much of junk in storage instead of permanently eliminating clutter which I have done at present) when I lived in Southern California. I was about to start a crazy, sleepless, partially dangerous, road trip and series of plane trips along the coast and then to europe. That’s a different story altogether but what I am zeroing in on was how pristine and simple and clear and clean and productive I felt in those oh 2-3 days before leaving. Nothing was in the apartment except my computer, a desk, sparse food, and I think a vacuum (which didn’t make it into storage or something). I am very tempted to retell the entire story of giving some fairly gross people in a lodge the vacuum to cover a room that I never used and flying to europe but I am zeroing in on that minimalism. During that time I wrote a great post on Richard Feynman. It got a great response and was one of my better posts. Most importantly, it was enjoyable to write. I wasn’t fighting and fidgeting to get away from time-siphoning and energy-draining clutter nad rubbish. Things are easier with minimalism. Thus, that is easily the top one-of-five things that I would like to install!
It’s amazing what having just the bare minimum, the essentials, for a project (in that case, writing a blog post) will do. Your thinking is sharper and the time between having an idea and concisely and lucidly putting it down on a crisp digital page is freakishly exponentially decreased with minimalism. It’s easier to accomplish things if you have what you need. Period. And nothing else. Thus, one of my five top things I’d like to install is, obviously, minimalism. I’m writing a book on minimalism. Read books on minimalism and put tremendous time and work into achieving that. When you read my book you’ll quickly understand that “Serious Minimalism” really requires work and the superficial, faulty, feeble, and unstable minimalism is what most people get when they “think” they have minimalism after doing a quick 1-2 day purging or cleaning. As you’ll see in my upcoming book, proper minimalism requires months and years of practice and work. So that’s one of my five installations that I would like to do and am very confident I will achieve it.
Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed” 1.
Indeed, just as a perception or a portrait reflects the beliefs and values and insights of the perciever or portrait, a multitude of birds, dogs, and five felines is an emblem of some larger belief, some interest. This is what this post is about. We’ve identified how perceptions (and portraits and pets) that are vastly different from others are emblematic of that individual’s dstinct beliefs and outlook. I think it’s better to have perspectives and belongings and outlooks and indeed “pets” that are unique to you and only you.
How To Select Your Top Five and Implement The Installations
Follow-Up with yourself. Remember what’s meaningful.
Really envision what would happen if you DID NOT install these in your life.
Utilize a combination of fun, achievement, progress, success, enjoyment, pleasure, and peace when selecting the top five things you’d like to install
Best suggestion: Think of the Top five things you need to install now and those are the five you will install!
References and End Notes
1. Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness. New York: First Vintage Books, 2005. p. 94.
Comprehending the isolated d-pawn strategies MASSIVELY helps opening decisions!
When confronted with a complex center squares bind, you can make the initiative to cause the game to end up in (what Pandolfini calls) a Pattern A or Pattern B pawn structure for the isolated d-pawn. In both patterns the d-file is open except for the isolated pawn. Very cool! Then you can learn to accustom yourself with Pattern A and Pattern B isolated d-pawns and have much more to work with to dissect a complex center-squared opening.
Differences between King Pawn and Queen Pawn Openings for the c-Pawns
When the e-pawn moves first as in King Pawn openings, the c-Pawns are on the backburner often defending the friendly d-pawns. But with a Queen Pawn opening, the c-pawns are often much more active and attacking the opposing d-pawns.
So for a King Pawn opening such as the Giuco Piano, Greco Variation (which I LOVE the Guico Piano) whites c-pawn will have a much more defensive role. It depends on how you like your c-pawns involvement really. If you want your c-pawns directly thrusting in attack, Queen Pawn openings support that, while the purely defensive c-pawns are connected more closely with the King Pawn openings.
Understanding the intricacies of the isolated d-pawn is incredibly helpful because it can often bridge the gap from opening strategy to all the fun tactics that permeate middle and end-game and most of the entire gameplay. If there’s one concept that blends strategy (opening large-scale goals) with tactics (skewers, pins, defending passed pawns from behinds, and the like) it’s understanding some of this isolated d-pawn strategy. Additionally, understanding d-pawn strategy and tactics definitely adds applicable insight to the very confusing concept of “pawn structure”. Have good pawn structure…great! HOW??!!! Understanding isolatd d-pawn tactics directly provides massive insight to pawn structure. Cool!
In going through the isolated d-pawn openings, you can really begin to “talk about what tactics and attacks are being deployed. xyz piece is threatening this, so move to support this piece and pressure this, etc” Very cool.
Pandolfini Praise
The diagrams are extremely helpful. Excellent chess book.
More on d-Pawns: Exploiting
If you’re up against an isolated d-pawn, the best strategy is to blockade the d-pawn so that it becomes a fixed target. Then pile up, stack, and overload the d-pawn (as well as defending your blockading piece). The pieces defending the d-pawn automatically are stuck in passive, often immobile defense-mode and can be easily exploited with maneuvers like pins, forks, and skewers. The best piece for blockading a d-pawn is the knight because of it’s ability to jump over pieces. The long-range pieces (bishops, rooks, queens, can attack from afar, so a knight towards the center placed in front of and blockading an opposing d-pawn is the best blockader.
Where isolated d-pawns are most important
The endgame is where d-pawns really become a prominent strategic factor. For this reason, if you have a d-pawn the best thing to do do is to exchange it and avoid it getting exploited. If you’re against someone who has a stranded little lonely isolated d-pawn, trading off pieces, even something extreme as exchanging queens may be ideal because then with minor and major pieces removed, the weakness of the opposing isolated d-pawn is pronounced.
Ultimately, if you’re defending your d-pawn, always try to have as many or more defenders as opponent attackers, and vice versa if attacking (aim to have more or as many attackers as defenders). The person with the most attackers or defenders will win the exchange, obviously.
Chess One-Sentence Truisms
Pawn are strongest defensively when standing on their home squares.
“Because if you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people. Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of hte most reliable of these facts is that hte average person doesnt’ see herself [or himself] as average. Most studnets see themselves as more intelligent than the average student, most business managers see themselves as more competentn than the average business manager, and most football players see themselves as having better “football sense” than their teammates” (Gilbert 252).
Granted, statistically some people actually are more intelligent, more competent, and have better football sense, but that wasn’t the shocking finding of the study. It’s that the average person thinks of him or herself as above average! So statistically, the average person over-estimates his or her abilities!
That’s fascinating and slightly disturbingly perplexing.
Now granted, the people that actually are above average may or may not consider themselves as such, but since they are not average, their self-opinion is irrelevant to this analysis.
“Economists explain that wealth has ‘declining marginal utility,’ which is a fancy way of saying that it hurts to be hungry, cold, sick, tired, and scared, but once you’ve brought your way out of these burdens the rest of your money is an increasingly useless pile of paper. ” (Gilbert 239).
So my interpretation of Gilbert’s interpretation of economical theory is that once money has helped you survive (i.e. not die). It’s more or less fairly useless. I actually fully agree with and understand that. I agree with the necessity of money for survival and well-being, but then, in stark contrast, its total negligibility and uselessness after survival has been acquired and one has basic living essentials for survival , but genuinely just taken care of, resolved, and certain. Once the burden of being concerned about basic survivals has been resolved, the utility of money plummets and the hassle of it starts to increase!
I fear musing on this too much for “testing this theory out” like I did in france or something rubbish. of testing out survival I will never test that out again. wilderness hiking is NOT survival; that’s enjoyment. As is work and computer work. Not knowing where will sleep is horridly scary in a city and not knowing if one will get food is also horrifying. But once survival needs are met, it’s good to know that money is a declining marginal utility!
For many, many months I have been interested in revamping and/or decreasing the content of this blog. As mentioned in this post frequency will likely decrease due to the presence of other important projects.
Every webmaster eventually knows that he or she needs tracking. The ability to track visitors, clicks, and the browsers, geographical regions, and more data of each visitor to your site is invaluable information! Properly setting up tracking is like learning about your customer so you can better serve the “guests” that surf the pages of your site! With more information of your site “guests”, you can
customize your posts, learn more about for what people were searching your site and write more material of those subjects
track your success measured by visitors and more!
The best way to do gather that invaluable tracking information is through the the mother (and father) of the Netfootnote_of_awesomeness_1, Google. Their exist many tracking methods to accumulate quantifiable data for your website, blog, and presence on the net, but one of the best is Google Analytics. I’ll show you how to setup and install that on your site (or blog).
Gather Your Essential Account Information
Implement the Tracking
There exist three main methods for getting the javascript that tracks every visitor and then outputs it to Google Analytics active on your site (or blog), copy and pasting the code, or using a plugin that utilizes your “web property id” or “google analytics uid”, finally an advanced route is to utilize javascript and php to implement the tracking information with your own code. Here’s how you accomplish both or either way.
Method 1: Copy and Paste the Code (Most Common Method)
How to access google analytics code:
Assess and make sure the tracking code is being picked up and transmitting to Google Analytics.
Filter out your own IP so you can distinguish page hits done by you.
Tracking Status: Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now.”
That’s what pops up in the yellow Tracking Status Information box that verifies Google Analytics is “set up” on your site!
Method 2: Use Plugins to Implement the Tracking Code
If you’re using a blogging platform like a self-hosted wordpress (wahoo! great blogging platform!) blog, there are numerous exciting plugin options that take care of the pesky analytics copy-paste javascript code placement for you. (Note: If you’re using a wordpress.com blogging platform, their “.com” service uses wordpress statistics to track your visits and this post doesn’t really apply to that.)
Google Analyticator – Adds javascript code; enables admin and user-specific filtering; #My personal favourite.
Personally, I like Google Analyticator as personal preference. I like being able to filter out my clicks and visits and the clicks and visits of any other user (Admin, Editor, Author, Contributor, and the like). Additionally, I have a way of not just eliminating that specific user type but filtering it into its own graph so I see unique non-admin visitors and my own visits and clicks, a useful bit of information to see because if I was doing a lot of testing or installing some new features or writing a lot of posts to a site, it can be useful to see your own visits at times. In terms of interpreting and reading graphs and data there are entire books written on that, but I like the ability to see, for example, an increase of me visiting my sites (writing more, installing new pages, touching up on the appearance of the site, adding new features, and more) and then a lot of traffic after that!
Remember all those plugins are very similar and all they really do is an elaborate form of Method 1: Copy and Paste the code directly from Google Analytics into the template. So if you have an aversion to using a plugin, Method 1 works just as well. I prefer to use the plugin because I usually only like editing the actual .php or .css templates to edit an appearance feature of the site(s), not to install something (like google analytics). Additionally, there’s the additional bonus of having advanced filtering (like eliminating the admin clicks on a site. Very cool!).
Method 3: Use php or Another Scripting Lanugage (Advanced)
The Importance of Analytics: First-Hand Experience
It’s invaluable to know when you are (or are not) getting traffic. It’s vital to know what posts or what days or what weeks or months caused a huge spike or plummet in traffic. That invaluable quantifiable data gives you information on what types of material to write about (if it drew a lot of traffic), what material to avoid (caused decrease in traffic) and what design features (for example upon installing ajax or some advanced features incompatible with older browsers you notice a large shift in visits) effect traffic.
I have tried using other tracking methods and “visits” often gets muddled with bots (non-human visitors “checking out your site”. It’s a preference if you would like to include “bot visits” as actual visits or not. Or, I sometimes could not distinguish my own site maintenance and site upgrade and update “visits” from actual visits, like “Hey there were a hundred more visits than normal on the 17th! Hey they were all from the same “visitor” and…Oh wait a minute!” And that was a day I wrote a lot and/or upgraded or tweaked a lot of features of the site design.
Conclusion
So conclusively, it’s important to have reliable, accurate, statistics, providing quantifiable data about your site as that measures its progress. This tutorial showed you how to ensure you have that information! Feel free to bookmark this site for future learning on your path as webmaster progresses; there is more from this site with tech Linuxgeekoid and its Partner POPP Software in the future!
footnotes_of_awesomeness
1. Well not really “mother and father”, considering the Internet’s Arpanet origins in the 1970s and that Google only came about relatively recently, specifically when it was founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Paige on September 4, 1998, but Google is one of the biggest presences on the net, and thus it’s smart to use their analytics to get this invaluable information about people attracted to and itnerested in the information on your site!
Every webmaster eventually knows that he or she needs tracking. The ability to track visitors, clicks, and the browsers, geographical regions, and more data of each visitor to your site is invaluable information! Properly setting up tracking is like learning about your customer so you can better serve the “guests” that surf the pages of your site! With more information of your site “guests”, you can
customize your posts, learn more about for what people were searching your site and write more material of those subjects
track your success measured by visitors and more!
The best way to do gather that invaluable tracking information is through the the mother (and father) of the Netfootnote_of_awesomeness_1, Google. Their exist many tracking methods to accumulate quantifiable data for your website, blog, and presence on the net, but one of the best is Google Analytics. I’ll show you how to setup and install that on your site (or blog).
Gather Your Essential Account Information
Implement the Tracking
There exist three main methods for getting the javascript that tracks every visitor and then outputs it to Google Analytics active on your site (or blog), copy and pasting the code, or using a plugin that utilizes your “web property id” or “google analytics uid”, finally an advanced route is to utilize javascript and php to implement the tracking information with your own code. Here’s how you accomplish both or either way.
Method 1: Copy and Paste the Code (Most Common Method)
How to access google analytics code:
Assess and make sure the tracking code is being picked up and transmitting to Google Analytics.
Filter out your own IP so you can distinguish page hits done by you.
Tracking Status: Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now.”
That’s what pops up in the yellow Tracking Status Information box that verifies Google Analytics is “set up” on your site!
Method 2: Use Plugins to Implement the Tracking Code
If you’re using a blogging platform like a self-hosted wordpress (wahoo! great blogging platform!) blog, there are numerous exciting plugin options that take care of the pesky analytics copy-paste javascript code placement for you. (Note: If you’re using a wordpress.com blogging platform, their “.com” service uses wordpress statistics to track your visits and this post doesn’t really apply to that.)
Google Analyticator – Adds javascript code; enables admin and user-specific filtering; #My personal favourite.
Personally, I like Google Analyticator as personal preference. I like being able to filter out my clicks and visits and the clicks and visits of any other user (Admin, Editor, Author, Contributor, and the like). Additionally, I have a way of not just eliminating that specific user type but filtering it into its own graph so I see unique non-admin visitors and my own visits and clicks, a useful bit of information to see because if I was doing a lot of testing or installing some new features or writing a lot of posts to a site, it can be useful to see your own visits at times. In terms of interpreting and reading graphs and data there are entire books written on that, but I like the ability to see, for example, an increase of me visiting my sites (writing more, installing new pages, touching up on the appearance of the site, adding new features, and more) and then a lot of traffic after that!
Remember all those plugins are very similar and all they really do is an elaborate form of Method 1: Copy and Paste the code directly from Google Analytics into the template. So if you have an aversion to using a plugin, Method 1 works just as well. I prefer to use the plugin because I usually only like editing the actual .php or .css templates to edit an appearance feature of the site(s), not to install something (like google analytics). Additionally, there’s the additional bonus of having advanced filtering (like eliminating the admin clicks on a site. Very cool!).
Method 3: Use php or Another Scripting Lanugage (Advanced)
The Importance of Analytics: First-Hand Experience
It’s invaluable to know when you are (or are not) getting traffic. It’s vital to know what posts or what days or what weeks or months caused a huge spike or plummet in traffic. That invaluable quantifiable data gives you information on what types of material to write about (if it drew a lot of traffic), what material to avoid (caused decrease in traffic) and what design features (for example upon installing ajax or some advanced features incompatible with older browsers you notice a large shift in visits) effect traffic.
I have tried using other tracking methods and “visits” often gets muddled with bots (non-human visitors “checking out your site”. It’s a preference if you would like to include “bot visits” as actual visits or not. Or, I sometimes could not distinguish my own site maintenance and site upgrade and update “visits” from actual visits, like “Hey there were a hundred more visits than normal on the 17th! Hey they were all from the same “visitor” and…Oh wait a minute!” And that was a day I wrote a lot and/or upgraded or tweaked a lot of features of the site design.
Conclusion
So conclusively, it’s important to have reliable, accurate, statistics, providing quantifiable data about your site as that measures its progress. This tutorial showed you how to ensure you have that information! Feel free to bookmark this site for future learning on your path as webmaster progresses; there is more from this site with tech Linuxgeekoid and its Partner POPP Software in the future!
footnotes_of_awesomeness
1. Well not really “mother and father”, considering the Internet’s Arpanet origins in the 1970s and that Google only came about relatively recently, specifically when it was founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Paige on September 4, 1998, but Google is one of the biggest presences on the net, and thus it’s smart to use their analytics to get this invaluable information about people attracted to and itnerested in the information on your site!
You may hear or see S.M.A.R.T. in regards to hard drive efficiency or hard drive “health”. SMART is an acronym that stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. As expected from that definition, it assesses and monitors and reports the health status of a drive.
Now what constitutes a drive’s “health”? Well, that can best be answered by observing what S.M.A.R.T. monitors:
spin up time – if the drive takes too long to spin up, that could indicate a problem with the read/write head possibly, and is indicative of an unhealthy drives.
temperature – if the drive gets too hot, that’s unhealthy as it could corrupt data or cause a malfunction.
and more
S.M.A.R.T. monitors, reports, an analyzes all of those aspects and components of a hard drive, making it a good predictor of hard drive health. In short, a S.M.A.R.T. status of failing is usually a reliable harbinger (or precedent, rather) to a hard disk that might become unusable, so you can then get data off of it and onto a non-corrupt one without bad blacks, essentially a healthier drive.
Hard Drive Diagnostics
This article says that there’s three main ways to test hard disk integrity: error-checking (checking deleted files which may still contain entries in the file system, corrupt files, and more inconsistencies), surface scans (which look at sectors of a drive and mark bad sectors), and S.M.A.R.T.
You can set preferences on some hard drive monitoring applications (like DiskCheckup, for example) to send you emails if a certain warning is met; many applications offer very thorough. CrystalDiskInfo, for example, allows alarms to be set for hard drive temperature and health!
Bad sectors can be caused by the read/write head, corrupt data, or other errors. Some drives even have spare sectors to use, if a bad sector emerges, but generally bad sectors are useful warning signs; healthy drives rarely have bad sectors.
Personally, for someone like me who has most of his life on hard drives, and whom is interested in being prudent about hard drive health AND someone interested in tech…well CrystalDiskInfo is like a dream come true. It rocks and displays a multitude of data in any easy-to-read format. It shows the drive partitions, temperature, health status, and tons of more advanced attributes such as:
Read Error Rate
Spin-up Time
Start/Stop Count
Reallocated Sectors Count
Seek Error Rate
Power-On Hours
Spin Retry Count
Power Cycle Count
End-to-End Error
Reported Uncorrectable Errors
and more. It’s very complete and thorough and I love learning about those tech health specs of my hard drives (essentially the “home” of my data). This is one of the most useful utilities I have ever utilized. It can check so many details. It’s like giving your drive a full doctor (tech doctor, though) checkup. Keeps your technology and your data healthy!
Bad Sectors
Basically there are two types of bad sector errors: soft errors and “hard” mechanical errors. Soft errors can be caused by software errors or when the read/write head slightly reads/write data in a way that causes a slight error that makes data on that sector illegible. Soft errors can be eliminated (by other means, too) by erasing the disk.
Mechanical “hard” errors can lead to more bad sectors because debris from mechanical errors may interfere with other sectors. When there’s mechanical erros, the hard disk will avoid using the mechanical error sectors (which might lead to the “spread” of bad sectors from debris) and use spare sectors instead.
Warning Signs
Just as you know warning signs for a cold, it’s good to know warning signs for a possible hard drive crash or failure (I’ve experienced a few hard drive crashes and fortunately, due to regular backups I lost very little or zero data; but I could have been even better prepared by monitoring error checkign rates and S.M.A.R.T status):
Frequent but irregular crashes, especially during boot-up
Frequent cryptic error messages
Folder and file names that have been scrambled and changed
Disappearing files
Long waits to open folders and files
Hard disk doesn’t spin up until after a long wait when opening a file
Basically anything that looks garbled where data could have been over-written…is a good indicator of hard disk soft, hard (mechanical) sector errors or impending crashes. This makes sense, too. If the hardware data is being over-written inappropriately, seeing garbled file names and messages in software would be understandable. This is all about reading the signs in software that may indicate problem with hardware (but great utilities like CrystalDiskInfo do that well).
CHKDSK
CHKDSK is a built-in windows utility for diagnostically checking the health of a hard drive. You invoke it by running cmd with Admin Privileges and then typing chkdsk at the cli command prompt.
CHKDSK has a number of parameters and takes the argument of the drive (as a drive letter, like C: or D:). Because it’s such a useful utility, here are some details of useful parameters:
/f – fixes errors on the disk (this requires the drive to be locked)
/v – for verbose, displays file names in every directory in real-time as the disk is checked
/r – locates bad sectors and uncovers readable info (drive must be lockable like the /f(ix) parameter)
/i – is useful for NTFS drives to reduce the search time by running a less vigorous check of the index.
there’s five more parameters (that are slightly more obscure), meaning chkdsk has 9 parameters to customize that useful command. Nice! Microsoft technet does a clear job of explaining the full list of all parameters has good explanations and remarks, too.
This about.com page that lists the capitals of every independent country puts the number at 196.
Finally, world atlas confirms (what is most likely to the best answer) that their is no correct answer but the number ranges and varies with 189, and 191-196 being acceptable answers.
Personal Interest in Other Countries
As someone very interested in relocating to Australia and/or the UK (or someplace other than the physical place of birth, The United States, for very specific reasons and also the reason of believing it’s good to “grow up” and leave where you were a youngin’. That’s what people do with small cities or towns. People scowl and look quizzically at the person who stayed in the small town their whole life. Why? Because they’re missing out on life! So why not the same with countries? I consider people who have relocated successfully to another country to usually be impressive individuals who typically lead very full lives. Relocating to another country is obviously not for everyone but in many cases it seems like the best thing to do and is often linked with success.
Country-Defining Criteria
The story of South Sudan (which is now it’s own country as of July 9, 2011) is brutal, but interesting. Six years slaughter resulting in the loss of millions of lives the politicians and cartographers and geographers and probably the military and whomever else is involved in “defining a country” more or less formally pulled the plug and South Sudan became its own country. That’s pretty awesome.
But basically, why care? I remember reading that a very small country (Vanuatu) prohibited something (I think it was absinthe). And so do other countries. Some countries prohibit some things, other countries don’t. Some countries are located at xyz longitude and latitude and have abc square miles if land mass. So? Politically, countries are just conglomerations of geographical longitude and latitude borders and rules and regulations (and obnoxious as hell customs officers). So what? Politically, countries are meaningless. I guess what is really significant to a “country” is culture. But culture is so ill-defined that it is practically meaningless. I guess you could define culture as food, anthropological customs, traditions, language, and hobbies of a people-clustering. But again that is vague. Where the hell is this going? I think I am debunking the significance of “country”. Orwell talked about how wars were fought purely to distract people from political details as a red herring.
Countries don’t really exist. Sure you can look them up in some book and see their surveyed boundaries or inquire about their military and rules and their days of independence and their country holidays and the country symbol and food. But they’re just like “clubs” or guilds or groups. They aren’t and don’t deserve to be this enormously significant thing. What does exist and what is real, is science. Botany for example varies greatly around the globe and has a variety of species so different they cannot cross-mate, predate and prey upon each other, and have entirely different taxonomical clusterings. Countries are man-made and therefore greatly spurious. Scientific species may evolve but that’s organic and based on unwavering evolution. Someone can just make up rules, pick some borders, scratch out some paperwork and Boom! a country exists. That’s spurious and bordering hoakey.
Math is Awesome
Now one interesting thing is math. Math is created in the mind. Pure mathematics especially is a science of the mind. It doesn’t require empirical data. One can explore the vast intricacies and awesome “worlds” of math with just a note-taking contraption (paper and pen, whiteboard, computer text file, whatever). How does it differ? Math is crisp and clear. If there’s grey area; it’s explicitly defined (like with a limit of a function). Best of all, there’s no pomposity (believe it or not, that is a word!) with math! In politics, you get bloated, fat-headed dolts impressed with how they make rules that “control” others. That’s rubbish. All the important things (math and science and the internet for example) transcend the rules of a country. Countries are a stale out-dated phenomenon and the fact that people still fret about them is silly and approaching sickening. I had a political science professor (yes, I majored in that abysmal subject) say that I was a “good citizen”, but he did so in a way that involved a snicker like he was implying “You’re a good citizen…who has no control and follows the rules of the powerful people who make them.” Not only was that a failed attempt to insult, it was just sad and pathetic. People who think they have control and are more “powerful” (power doesn’t exist outside of reciprocity, resistance, and one other r according to my interpretation of foucault) because they make petty rules (and rules of a country are petty; they should be followed, but they are irrelevant to the important things like science and math and internet wahoo!).
Why am I writing this? It sounds like I should just be doing posts on math, science, and computer science because that’s what I like. I guess I am writing this because I don’t feel my work is clear. It’s still blurred in someway. I haven’t done posts on math, science, and computer science in great amounts, which is what I like. So maybe the result of this is that I’ll just be focusing less (or not at all) on what I dislike and more on what I like, science and math!
Okay, I’ll confess. I started a sister/brother site that I have been working in addition to Validate Your Life. In all honesty, I prefer the other site much better. I think the analogy would be:
Validate Your Life : Paper Towels
My Computer Science Site : Silk
or
Validate Your Life : Tap Water
My Computer Science Site : Quintuple Distilled Reverse Osmosis Chemically Filtered H20
To be blunt, it’s just a lot better. That’s alarming because I’ve put 1000s and 1000s of hours of work into this site and over 600 posts and I’ve been doing that for over 8 years. This computer science site I started in 2007, but only really activated and amped it up 6 months ago. It’s easier to write posts on it. When I surfed I often came across huge patches of kelp. These were obnoxious and slightly dangerous (your board leash could get snagged on kelp and becoming entangled in kelp – which can be quite heavy – is, well, is frightening). If you’re a surfer, or have surfed enough to experience large blotches of kelp, you know that large quantities of kelp, 200m from shore, can feel like quicksand. Well, Validate Your Life feels like surfing in kelp-infested areas. I never really know what to write about on it because it has been an “everything” site for so long. For awhile it was coaching, but I was the one who wanted coaching more than to deliver coaching! So I feel like there’s too much “kelp” on this site in sense. On my computer science site, there’s just clean, quintupled-filtered water waves. In short, to finally abandon that long and possibly confusing metaphor, it’s easier to write and then post, posts that I find meaningful on the other site.
Aren’t They The Same?
Aren’t the sites more or less just different categories of post, but considering that they’re written by the same author, just parts of the “same site”? This is related to the Ship of Theseus paradox and change. You don’t do the same things you did when you were 4 nor 14 nor 24 (there may be exceptions, but usually you “outgrow” something). There’s two arguments here:
Yay Continuity – You’ve done something all along and therefore you should just continue doing it because it doesn’t make sense to start-stop tons of ventures.
Boo Continuity – Just because you’ve done something for many years, if it’s no longer rewarding nor enjoyable, it doesn’t make sense to continue doing it “just for the sake of continuity”.
So those two arguments have torn my brain to shreds at times. I start to delete something or to shutdown something that seems very “shut-downable” and then I think well I’ve done it for this long, why not just continue with it? But then I think but if it’s not rewarding, why not just move on? So there you go. How is this related to countries? Well, countries form. Sudan could have just said this is rubbish and lived with it, but they chose to shutdown and reform something.
I’ve noticed when I do things I often do them in a way that produces a very strong defined outcome. Granted, the way of doing them may be very silly or thick-headed at times even! But once I’ve completed something I know for certain what I don’t like and what I do like. One example was school. I applied to about 10 different graduate schools in 2005 after graduating 6 months early from college. I was one of the first people in my class to graduate (certainly not the best grades, average grades, but I wanted to get the degree and get the hell out of Dodge ASAP. Why? I was hindered by school. I assign myself homework. I’m auto-didactic. Most that I learn, I’ve taught myself. School was like a “show” that was discombobulating when I could just utilize my self-discipline to teach myself knowledge I had wanted to learn. Why pay tens of thousands of dollars to sit in someone else’s class who designs what they want to teach? Maybe that’s for some people, but not for me. I learn best when I pick what I want to learn and teach/study that on my own. But I applied to 10 graduate schools in an absurd and ludicrous and stupid array from majores (from organizational psychology to nutrition to teaching to english and more). I didn’t want to do graduate school! And fortunately, I didn’t. But here’s the whole point of retelling this bit of personal history: at the time I was panic and emotionally invested in graduate school and thought I did want to do it (a part of me did). This is what I mean by “emerging from things with a very strong understanding”. It was slightly silly and possibly obtuse to apply and do all the work to get into a graduate schools when ultimately I really didn’t want to do it. It was like I had to obtusely endure suffering and exhaustion and exasperation of doing that whole applying process to then fully have the strong understanding that I not only prefer but know and understand that it’s much more advantageous for me to have an autodidactic approach. Plus, I learn the best when teaching, anyways! Why couldn’t I, in 2005, just say, Graduate School doesn’t make sense. It would be just a credential on my already multi-paged resume and the process of it would be a waste of time. This is atypical from my peers, but it’s what’s the most logical for me to do. It was almost like I had to create an avalanche of history, of bad unpleasant experiences, to use as empirical data of “why that’s not a good thing to do”, instead of just doing what I want! So that’s the whole “emerging with a strong outcome through an asinine methodology” concept.
Plus, school is a business! It’s a scam. Intelligence ≠ Educated necessarily. High IQs do not always work in schools. School is just an evaluation business for evaluating how well you inputted and outputted information into your mind. Einstein got rubbish grades and Bill Gates dropped out. There are countless examples of highly intelligent people either being incompatible (Einstein) or abandoning (Gates) school because they realize it’s useless. Personally, I’m a bit sickened at how many years (19) I was in institutions being evaluated with the letters A, B, D, E, F, or P (for Pass Fail). I like metrics but it was subjective. I like progress but it was always someone else’s manufactured progress. One teacher could give a very different grade and when progress isn’t universal (like math), it can barely considered progress at all.
So I guess the extracted lesson elixir from all this is to just logically understand why something personally is not compatible for you and to understand why something different is very logical and aligning and then to do the logical and aligning thing! Pretty simple!
Okay, mabye I’ll add more to this post, but I feel it’s becoming too political and I hate politics. So jolly good!
All descriptions of the movements on this page are the sole property and work of John Thomas Kooz.
Originally this page was simply a list of all the music that appeared in audio blog snippets (as intros or outros usually) around the Validate Your Life Network, but I have extended it so that it has more utility. Now this page can be used for identifying classical music pieces!
Ever since “classical music” replaced “card and coin tricks” of my Cs of hobbies it had been a major goal to identify a dozen or so quality, essential classical music pieces, and there movements, by ear. A bit of backstory in the “Cs of hobbies” bit: I had three Hobbies that began with the letter C: Computers, Chess, and Card tricks; as you will see in the 10 Card, 10 Coin Tricks post, Computers became career, Chess remained a great hobby, and Card tricks was completely replaced (I outgrew it) with classical music.
So the selections that I would like to identify by ear are what follows. Quite usefully, links to the actual music are provided as well as some optional biographical or fact-based information about the composer and/or the piece.
This page now has utility in my project of identifying specific classical music pieces by ear and serves me well in that regard. If you have an interest in a similar project, I trust this page will serve your ears as well!
I have dissected all twelve of the pieces I want to identify by ear and for each movement have scrupulously detailed acoustic patterns that can be used to “describe” a movement as to better mnemonically recall and then later identify each masterpiece.
A rich vocabulary easily and naturally emerges when describing classical masterpieces, I have discovered.
For shits and giggles I sequenced these in reverse-era sequence, meaning that the baroque pieces are last and the nationalist-modernist pieces are first. They have been meticulously sequenced in reverse chronological order of premiere day of each piece.
Nationalist (Czech): Smetana Moldau Nationalist (English): Gustov Holst The Planets Nationalist (French): Debussy Dialog du la Vent et la Mer Nationalist (Russian): Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring Romantic: Brahm’s 4th Symphony Romantic: Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Ballet Classical/Romantic: Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. 1824. Classical/Romantic: Beethoven’s 5th Symphony Classical: Mozart’s 31st Symphony “Paris”, K. 297/300a Classical: Mozart’s 22nd Symphony Baroque: Bach amazing allegro
Beethoven’s 9th Symphony
9th – 1st Movement
Mnemonic How it Sounds: Like a brewing, building, crescendoing simmer of an orchestra.
Reflection on the Video: The Conductor, Leonard Bernstein, looks like a seasoned musicman, like one of the ancient composers himself! Wow the camera zooms on this were incredible. Easily one of the best details of 9th Symphony Movement1! You know it’s difficult to tell which time period this was played in (it turns out to be 1989) because costumes, instruments, tones, and the like are basically invariants in classical music! But I saw specs on one person and this looks like it was from a few decades ago. I joyfully chuckled whenever the camera showed Bernstein’s mannerisms and facial expressions, which are a bit of an orchestra in themselves!
9th – 2nd Movement
Mnemonic How it Sounds: In the opening like an electric whiz-bang of sound, direct and abrupt compared to the first movement. Throughout the piece there is a cheerful but kind of menacing twirly chime interrupted with bellows from a kettle drum on occasion and many loud erupting crescendos reminding you this is not a trivial piece. In fact, the entire movement sounds a lot like a crescendo finale to an entire concert, but extended over an entire movement.
9th – 3rd Movement
Mnemonic How it Sounds: The piece commences with a smooth, gradual, gentle, peaceful lilting of the woodwinds. This is soon accompanied by a slow and gradual interlude of the strings. It seems like this piece is the eye of the storm of the first two movements; it is remarkably different from the intensity of the first two movements; instead of blaring kettle drums, the kettle drum is gently tapped. If the first two movements were a raging squall, this is the placid calm sea. If the first two movements were a hurricane, the third movement is a sweet, gentle breeze on a grassy plain with a daffodil blowing in the wind…But alas! around 20 minutes into the piece there’s an explosion of the kettle drums and brass immediately followed by an immensely ominous and deep chorus of strings. Then twinklings of the second movements electric chimes sprout forth seemingly leaking into the tail end of the third movement. There’s a lot of variation in this movement and if you fail to listen to the entire thing, the last seven minutes or so (the last 1/4 of the movement) may alarm you.
9th – 4th Movement
Mnemonic How it Sounds: The opening of the 4th Movement is extremely easy to identify. It has that deep sombre string tone, but the cheerful melody is the easily-identifiable “Ode to Joy” melody that flavourfully brandishes the entire Movement. At around 3:00 minutes, with magnificent boldness the entire chorus joins the Ode to Joy vein that was carried primarily by the strings up until the three minute mark. Then in another minute at a half (around 4:30) you hear a few-second smash of the ominous chords that erupted the peace of Movement 3 immediately followed by…a Voice! And then more voices! If there was ever a coallescing crescendo in music, it’s the coallescences of inklings of previous melodies from all past three movements, voice, and the entire orchesstra in this 4th movement of Beethoven’s. Around eight minutes there’s a stark silence and then a light, but snappy almost marching-like chime primarily carried by the floutists, builds up into another all-orchestra crescendo. Also, during a few minutes in last 6-7 minutes of this movement the voice corral sounds like it’s saying (I won’t profess to understand the words) “our dimension”, “our dimension”. That may not be useful to you, but if and when I hear that it, it helps me identify the already extremely recognizable piece. The last half of the movement becomes unspeakably amazing as entire choruses of onboard voices become their own prominent instrument in this conclusion of this movement.
Reflection on the Timeless Piece:
The fourth movement transforms a lot. I am critical of the fact that it is so starkly different from the first two dark and violent movements that it almost doesn’t seem connected with the first three movements; essentially, I was initially critical that it seemed like the fourth movement didn’t belong with the first three parts of the symphony, but I guess that’s what makes this genuinely a masterpiece (and easily one of my all-time favourite, if not my #1 favourite, pieces of music of all time); the piece evolves drastically and tremendously throughout all four movements! There’s really no room for being bored listening the Beethoven’s 9th. If it gets a bit soporific in the 3rd movement, that’s an illusion because of that ominous eruption 3/4 of the way into the third movement, and then 4th movement is so, so, unspeakably different with crescendos of voice and the entire orchestra. You know, Beethoven went deaf but despite that anatomical defect, he’s pretty lucky; people have been playing his compositions (quite joyfully and ambitiously, too) for centuries after his death and will continue to do so.
(Okay, actually I learned about this a few days ago, but wanted to share).
Why this is Important?
We’re 70% H20 (Hey roughly the same proportion of water as the earth!). Water is in all our cells, in our blood, in our brain, in our organs. The water we drink touches every cellular nuance of our body. Fuel in a car only touches the engine. The petrol people put into motors (for buses or trains or automobiles) (I don’t use cars, obviously) touches the motor and the exhaust pipe. The petrol doesn’t effect the seats, interior, chassis, wheels, axel nor any of the other parts of mechanical transportation. Water, however does. Whatever effects our feet, our skin, the vitreous fluid in our eyeballs has water in it. If you dent a car bumper or puncture a tire, the petrol put into the automobile is irrelevant. Human bodies are not cars (obviously!). When you cut yourself (like an epidermal minor laceration or abrasion) the blood platelets that rush to seal that and heal that gash and the blood and the skin and every component of your body contains and is effected by the quality of water you drink. Every miniscule or large component of our body has water in it. Therefore, the quality of water we drink effects every part of our body. The quality of water you drink seriously effects how efficiently your body physiologically functions. Toxic water can distort and discombobulate your physiology, whereas pure water can detoxify and is the best “fuel” possible for optimal clarity, productivity, success, fitness, energy, and focus.
The Types of “Pure” Water
There’s only two types of “pure” (95-99% pure) water: reverse osmosis and distilled. “Spring” water may have trace impurities or minerals in it and charcoal filtered water has many particles that are small enough to pass through the filters.
Reverse osmosis pushes water through a membrane away fromthe solvents (water is the solute). In normal osmosis, water (the solvent) moves towards (ul) the solutes to create equilibrium in the solution. Reverse osmosis works by using a lot of pressure to push the water through a membrane and most all solutes are left behind, resulting in 95-98% pure water.
Distilled water is purified through evaporation. The water turns to vapor and practically all solutes are left behind before the vapor condenses back into water. Distilled water is usually around 99% pure, but can occasionally have different types of minute impurities (that woudl not pass through a reverse osmosis membrane), and is very often more expensive than reverse osmosis water.
Overall, you can’t go wrong with reverse osmosis nor distilled water.
This article was extremely well-written and clear, more clear than medical texts (which delusionally and incorrectly often suggest water “with minerals” is healthy. That’s ridiculous. Water should be pure and clean. Take vitamins or eat minerals from healthy vegetables. Do not “get minerals” from water!”
Final Tips
It’s strange. When people travel they say to “watch out for the bad water”. I feel I am traveling in the United States because out of Costa Rica, Mexico, Australia, and France, I have encountered the most poisonous, toxic, dangerous, (and diarhea-causing) water in the United States. Maybe that means I’m at home in those other places and traveling in the States. Who knows, but what matters is clean water. After a toxic experience with rust-filled water I will aim to remember to carry a TDS Meter. With that you can measure the ppm (parts per million) of solutes in the water (water is the solute, but drinking water shouldn’t be a heterogenous/homogenous solution at all, just H20!).
Set a Threshold
Set a maximum TDS reading of what you will drink. It’s your body. You should demand a maximum threshold of pollution you will physiologically allow! When I was drinking water saturated with rust and manganese, you feel groggy and a bit lost. I will never drink water over 200ppm (and that’s a liberal thredhold)!
Okay, I don’t know about you, but my entire life is on hard drives. When you start pushing 1 Terabyte (or more…or three times as much or more!) you must have a rudimentary understanding of how your hard drives work. If you don’t even have a curiosity about how a hard drive works and you have that much data (1TB+), something is wrong with how you view the world haha! Okay, maybe not that problematic, but it is
useful – you can make better choices on which hard drive(s) to purchase knowing more about latency, access time, and seek time
interesting/fascinating – it’s amazing so much data can be stored on a contraption the size of a typical paper-based books (a hardrive can store the equivalent of millions and millions of ebooks)
exciting – tech, learning knowledge, and DIY (do it yourself and learning more about hard drives may help you partition and do many other nifty things yourself to improve your computer efficiency!) are awesome
Learning about how the holding container for all (if your totally digital like me) photos, ebooks, files, documents, films, thoughts, notes, and everything is held and accessed is awesome and essential.
Access Time
Wikipedia provides a rudimentary and decent explanation:
Seek time - is the time for the actuator arm to reach the desired disk track.
Rotational latency - the delay for the rotation of the disk to bring the required disk sector under the read-write mechanism. It greatly depends on rotational speed of a disk, measured inrevolutions per minute (RPM).
Additionally,
Spin-up time – is the time required to accelerate the disk to operating speed. Most drives are left spinning to improve access time, but drives may be spun down to reduce energy use ornoise as for example in laptop computers.
is often a factor. For now, we’re just focusing on the Seek Time and (Rotational) Latency as those are the factors that stay the same (and are consistent, if you’re drive is already spinning, the spin-up time will not have much impact on “Access Time” but it will if your drive is asleep, and the like). So factoring in spin-up time makes comprehending “Access Time” a bit more, well, overly complicated.
Basically
Access Time = Seek Time + Latency
Seek time is the time delay it takes for the read/write head to access the desired track or spot. Let’s make an analogy to finding something in boxes. Seek time is the amount of time it takes (an idiot who hasn’t discovered the joy of hard drives and actually keeps things in boxes!) a normal person to find a box that contains items they want to get. Then, rotational latency (this is stretching the analogy, but it works) is the time it takes to find/rummage to get the item within that box. Okay, the analogy is a stretch, but it kind of works.
There are mainly 5900 or 7200 RPM disks. Which do you think will have the better (shorter) latency? Obviously, the faster 7200 RPM drive. Another factor is that faster drives (7200 instead of 5900 may use more wattage. Many green drives are around 5900 RPM). Seek time is another factor. If the read/write head takes forever to access the correct track on the Hard Disk even if it has a blazing fast RPM (nearly no latency), it still may appear sluggish.
Best thing is to get a drive that has
the desired storage space
fastest RPM = shortest latency
fhortest Seek Time
desirable Cost (within financial distribution)
Conclusion
There are more factors (rotational latency + seek time + command overhead +settle time + spinup time are all factors) but the ones that have the largest impact on Access Time is Latency and Seek Time.
Conclusively short seek time + short latency (fast RPM) = very fast access time, which means your data is “found” (read) or written on the drive at optimal feed.
This is more of a curiosity knowledge post (unlike the post on encryption or partitioning) because you may not actually utilize this knowledge but it’s awesome to know what’s going on with your hard drive. Also, I may do a follow-up post with more in-depth discovery of awesomeness with binary searches and the crazy complex world of computer searches (there’s many different types of searches, from the top of my mind divide and conquer, binary search, bubble sort, and others).
As for getting drives, I am not pretentious enough to offer a universal, but what I personally prefer is:
external Hard drives – Toshiba. Simply because I got a toshiba drive in france, it has held up with 0% failure and all subsequent external Toshiba hard drives have worked marvelously and they make a very portable compact (2.5) external hdd.
internal Hard drives – Seagate. First off, I never ever purchase Western Digital. AFAIK, those drives are rubbish and I had a half terabyte completely crash. Seagate is one of the very first (oldest) cost-effective internal hard drive manufacturers for personal computers and they make excellent internal drives for building your own rig!
Ever set out to “Really, seriously clean out this room,” then find yourself, 20 minutes later, slowly sorting through photos and memorabilia, unable to toss a single thing? Erin Doland, editor of the Unclutterer blog, explained in a guest post why we can’t help holding onto clutter. The more you touch things over a lifetime, but also in the last few minutes, the more attached you grow to those things. It’s why every retailer worth their salt wants you to test, try, but most of all handle their sample goods, and it’s why you find it hard to toss things that were once precious, but now totally useless. Have a friend or professional help you out by holding things up for you, rather than let your hands get all sentimental. Photo by Elsie esq..
Thought this was particularly clever, too. Avoid HALT when considering purchasing anything:
Do you really need another 16 GB thumb drive to move files around, or are you just angry with all the tech problems you had at work? Are you really in need of a garage sale panini press, or are you just late on grabbing lunch? It’s not such a stretch. As the Moolanomy personal finance blog points out, the role of HALT feelings–Hunger, Anger, Loneliness, Tiredness–are no small thing in the impulsive decisions we make. Step back from that thing you’re about to open your wallet for, consider your HALT levels, and maybe you don’t end up a bit more weighed down with the unnecessary.
–Read more from this amazing set of 10 productivity mindhacks at lifehacker.
Also this article discusses anchoring in a way that higher initial price makes lowered ‘sale” price almost deceptively seem like a better bargain. Contrast effect at work and the sup-average article didn’t include very much NLP (which I thought it would given the anchoring concept), but a decent article nevertheless.
The Stranger test is designed to minimize impulse purchases where you picture some stranger offering you the money or the product, most of time will take money, justifying not making the purchase.
A clever article on how product branding uses colors to sway purchasing decisions (in a distorted way) resulting in the good advice of reminding to purchase items based on nutrition and dietary preference instead of packaging!
The content of this site may drastically change and it is very likely that the frequency of posting may diminish. All the hundreds of posts on the Validate Your Life network will be always available for free, but subsequent posts, updates, and content may diminish and/or change greatly. This site will link to any other new relevant projects.
That said…here’s some insights on resolutions.
Resolutions Compilation
Here I include all my past resolutions for the past half a dozen years or so with a few notes, observations, and reflections on goal achievement.
First, being a practitioner of NLP many of my resolutions were well-defined with immense detail (in order to have a well-defined outcome). I am shifting away from that practice this year for two good reasons:
- While well-defined outcomes make them more crisply “check-offable” (meaning you know when you’ve accomplished one of the goals, when they’re so defined you can become obsessive and they are too time-consuming.
- If you have a well-defined outcome and don’t achieve it, you know that and that is disconcerting.
Well-defined outcomes are essential for projects and actions. A MUST! But for resolutions and things that last an entire year, I’ve learned well-defined outcomes can be enslaving. Well-defined outcomes are essential for a day, week, or month-long project but for something that defines a year, they can be enslaving and problematic. So my resolutions for this year simply are to:
1. Declutter and Enjoy minimalism. (in Past years I would have likely defined exactly how many of exach category of object I’d allow myself to have and whatnot)
2. Keep doing things I like and don’t fiddle with rubbish of which I am uncertain or dislike.
3. Keep body (yoga, jump-rope, occcasional bike/sprint/swim, climbing, gymnastics, tai chi) in decent shape and keep mind in decent shape (logical fallacies, math, meditation, self-therapy reviewing files)
4. If a project is old and valuable, finish it; otherwise if it is lame abandon it, and finish projects moreso than start new ones!
That’s it!
I have heaps of projects I need and want to finish, but I am choosing those not to make those specific new years resolutions.
Also, in past years I set exact dollar amounts I wanted to earn or precise monthly mileage I wanted to achievce and I either
a. Was enslaved to achieving those or
b. Didn’t achieve them and felt inadequate.
So no well-defined outcomes for resolutions makes sense. Jolly good.
Disclaimer: I felt it necessary to include this Disclaimer. If you consider yourself to have a modicum of faith in any religion, there exists a high degree of certainty (almost a guarantee) that this and other “Atheism For The Win” posts will either decrease your faith or make you angry. That is not my intention. My intention in this post is simply to share what I know is true, and my intention in this disclaimer is simply to share viable consequences.
Note: Naturally, the audio blog is much more informative and detailed than the written portion. The audio blog contains all the information in the written portion and about a half hour more of discussion on this post.
This is going to be brief because Richard Dawkins (one of my five british heroes, and one of the most enlightened and helpful people I can think of) has already prescribed, clarified, illustrated, and elucidated almost every point on atheist with incredible lucidity, cogency, humor, whit — and well, just awesome, it’s just awesome, put it that way — in his books (like the God Delusion, the Blind Watchmaker, and on a more purely scientific level, The Greatest Show on Earth).
Dawkins has replaced Douglas Adams (who, in turn, replaced Roald Dhal — all three mind you, British literary gents) in the author of whose nascent and emergent penned ideas are what I eagerly read upon each release. In short, I think it’s great to have an author (and to choose this one wisely) whereby you read each of their books when they’re released. I’m looking forward to the next Dawkins book and find his teachings, writing style, and clarity, as said before, just awesome.
So anyways, basically, Dawkins said this better than I am, but I wanted to share this condensed version of some ideas and pointers I had and picked up.
All Those Types of Gods
Darrow: Mother Goose
Mueller: two enormous green lobsters
Invisible Inaudible, Unicrorn
Flying spaghetti monster who people believe has touched them with his noddly appendage! BRILLIANT!
What’s hysterically appealing to the enligthened and lucid mind is all of this idiotic fabrications of pure lunacy are all equally “plausible” gods! This leads us to the famous teapot example.
QUOTE
There could be a teapot orbitting the earth. Just like when all thoe imbeciles prayer to their skygod, that skygod could really be Mother Goose, or an invisible unicord, or, yes, the holy Flying Spaghetti Monster. I love the ridiculing touch of the FSM having “noodle appendages”.
I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that hte questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mihtras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf, and the Flying Spaghetti Monstoer” (Dawkins 76)
Sheer Brilliance of Stable Happiness
“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.” (dawkins Delusion 194).
That’s amusing and very succinct but it’s communicating a lot. That one sentence of Dawkins alludes to “the composition of happiness”. It’s like with food, you can eat 1000 calories of soggy, fried hamburger slop or 1000 calories of some tasty, healthy vegetarian, fresh indian dish and say that each person is both full, they’ve both had a meal. But the person who had the healthy food, via digestive, circulatory, and nervous system will consequentially emotionally be a lot better off than the person who ate slop. The same is true for happiness. If the source of happines is this delusional fabrication (religion), sure that provides some temporary feeble consolation, but in reality, it’s fragile and unstable, wavering happiness. Happiness derived from things that are actually true like, I don’t know, mathematics, astronomy (like the fact that some reasons earth is habitable are because of having a non-binary star system, the goldilocks effect of planetary placement, and the gravitational equilibrium created by the presence of the moon), biology, physiology, all of those provide a much sounder and more stable form of happiness.
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” – Seneca the younger
“Do you accept your lord jesus christ as your savior?”
I woke up after a restful and delightful sleep with those foul, delusional, and manipulative words ringing in my ears. Why was a plagued with such an infernal question? It at first frigthened me and then annoyed me, but then provided me with some leverage and satisfaction. I realized I had that question destructively circulating in my mind because it had been asked of me dozens of times, but I had never answered it! I heard it numerous times being prosetylized by missionaries in Costa Rica; I heard it from the occasional door-to-door religious neanderthal invading one’s private residence with delusional, corrupt, and evil misleadings about the truth of the universe; I’d had people ask me that in conversations when I realized that they (sadly) were a person of faith. And I don’t think I ever had answered the question, mainly, because at the time, I wasn’t certain on what I yet believed. Other people had shared, encroached, screamed, and declared what they believe in books, in voice, in person, and in conversatons but I hadn’t yet decided how to answer that yet on my own. Sever prosetylization in Costa Rica occurred in 2003 and 2005; it’s 2011 now, six years later. I’ve had many conversations with religious people and atheists. Why now was this question circulating in my brain? I figured it out. Because I now know my answer:
No. Quite vehemently, with 100% conviction and certainty, no, I do not accept a fictional, fabricated, source of propaganda, mythological figure, of whose non-existence I have evidential certainty, referred to as Jesus, “Our Lord and Savior”, “The Son of Mary”, “The Son of God”, as any form of savior; I denounce and resent any of the fabrications that delusionally paint the picture of his false existence, and even if he did exist (which he did not), his life has only had a deterring, misleading, and abominably misdirecting impact on the clarity of millions of people’s minds; in many ways I loathe the misleading concept of Jesus, but most of all I hate (and I selectively have chosen that powerful word “hate”) religious people. I loathe the amount of time they waste in their brainwashing cult churches, but my strongest aversion is the amount of brainpower they waste deluding and cognitively polluting the mind with foul and toxic rubbish that bars and steals from a person truth about astronomy, cosmology, biology, sparks genocidal atrocities such as 9/11, The Holocaust, and the Crusades, and ultimately wastes people’s time. If you disliked the Nazi party, the nazi ideology, and the nazi beliefs, would you accept Hitler as your Lord and savior? The entire question is preposterous because there exists no “sky-god”, the only savior of “my life” will be a medical doctor physiologically and scientifically examining my body as anatomically my body naturally deteriorates due to the mortality of the homo sapiens species, and further more, going beyond the ludicrous query of accepting a non-existent force as some form of “bandaid” or “salvation”, the entire ideology of said “non-existent force” is not merely caked or blemished with delusions, lies, and toxic misleadings, and manipulations, but is, indeed, 100% entirely incorrect, invalid, and fabricated.
So that is my unpolished answer. If I find myself being asked that putrid inquiry more frequently, I may make business cards to hand to the lost and confused interrogator to deliver my full and personally-designed response.
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Regardless of where you are in the world…regardless of your purpose in life…this literature written by English author Charles Dickens, first published by Chapman & Hall on December 17, 143 (168 years ago!)… Is A C-L-A-S-S-I-C!
Download the Stave. Put it on your mp3 player and Enjoy the Holiday Cheer.
Regardless of where you are in the world…regardless of your purpose in life…this literature written by English author Charles Dickens, first published by Chapman & Hall on December 17, 143 (168 years ago!)… Is A C-L-A-S-S-I-C!
Download the Stave. Put it on your mp3 player and Enjoy the Holiday Cheer.
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