Posnit Ubek — Andrew Swift — Personal Blog
So there's that…
I grew up in Amherst and I live with my family in Toulouse. I try to be curious.
status: I spent the day programming. I'm tired but I got a huge amount done. 75% positive ;-)
261113
Dust in My Mind
In the 90s I read the book The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron:
The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity is a 1992 self-help book by American author Julia Cameron.
The book was written to help people with creative recovery, which teaches techniques and exercises to assist people in gaining self-confidence in harnessing their creative talents.
I remember it being a great book, although I don't remember many details.
In the book Cameron suggested writing three pages about anything, every day when starting work.
That idea really stuck with me, and I've been doing it for a long time — I write three pages, whatever comes into my mind.
It takes about 30-40 minutes, and then I throw the pages a way.
I have a small pad next to me, and if I think of something I need to remember, I write it there.
At first, I had all these brilliant insights, and my little pad filled up quickly.
As time goes by however, I find that my mind is calmer, and I rarely have amazing insights or ideas that I need to write down.
The process seems like a sort of meditation — the more you do it, the less you buy into the seriousness of your ideas.
At first I thought I was just becoming a boring person, but really I'm just slowly cleaning out the attic of my mind.
Now, mostly what's left is just dust and a few scraps of paper… the occasional sunbeam comes through the garret window, but less frequently.
tags: #meditation #art #technique #writing
261030
Both Languages
Source: B. Kliban
tags: #rats #language #humor
261029
It Feels Good to Believe
There are things that feel good to believe, and there are things that are true.
Personally (he said pretentiously), I feel it's important to know the difference.
I read that people don't buy lottery tickets to win, they're buying a week of fantasies about becoming rich.
But you can have fun with the little superstitions — making tea the just the right way, as it were.
tags: #beliefs #reality #superstition #tea
261028
The Task of Becoming a Man
I thought there was a great line: accept as your moral ideal the task of becoming a man…
This is the persistent motif: you have to will yourself into existence. You have to choose who you will be.
Galt says elsewhere, your self is your mind — renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow.
—Henry Oliver talking about Atlas Shrugged on The Common Reader at 1:28:34
tags: #ayn-rand #human-nature
261015
People Are Nice
I live in a Toulouse. It's the third- or fourth-largest city in France. Apart from the occasional drug-dealer shootout in the papers, it's a nice place to live.
This morning I dropped my wallet on the sidewalk after accompanying my son to school.
This is what it looked like:
If you're not familiar with european money, that's a 50€ bill sticking out.
Someone called me within ten minutes to tell me she'd found my wallet.
tags: #nice #human-nature
261009
The Attack of the Mind Spiders
I have had really good experiences with meditation. When I've done it for more than a few days, I feel noticeably calmer and more organized.
Of course, it's annoying to do… you sit there and get all clear and calm, and then of course, you're suddenly extra motivated to go work and… there are still twenty minutes left of sitting still.
And I was thinking: meditation is like a (perhaps mythical) treatment for arachnophobia.
For treating your fear of spiders, we'll put you in a room full of tarantulas, on a chair.
You'll freak out the first N times, but gradually you'll get comfortable and realize that the spiders aren't actually that dangerous.
The parallel with meditation is that you're put on a chair, in a room filled with your thoughts.
You'll freak out the first N times, because your thoughts all seem REALLY important, and letting go of them seems like a really bad idea.
But after a while, you start to realize that your thoughts are NOT actually that important, that you can get by just fine without taking them so seriously.
tags: #meditation #healing
261006
A Perfect Justification for Violence
There are ideologies, such as those of militant religions, nationalism, Nazism, and Communism, that justify vast outlays of violence by a utopian cost-benefit analysis.
If your belief system holds out the hope of a world that will be infinitely good forever, how much violence are you entitled to perpetrate in pursuit of this infinitely perfect world?
Well, as much as much as you want, and you're always ahead of the game. The benefits always outweigh the costs.
Steven Pinker, evolutionary psychologist, from "The Better Angels of Our Nature".
tags: #morality #violence #human-nature
261002
A Key Quest of Human Existence
Adam Mastroianni, on why one shouldn't accept incentives as the main motivation for human behavior:
A key part of human development, I think, is figuring out what's right, what's wrong, and how you personally can increase the right and decrease the wrong to develop a value system.
This feels to me like a part and parcel of like the development of secondary sexual characteristics in adolescence — that happens, and meanwhile, you're also trying to do this thing.
This is part of the human mission as you go through life — to figure out "how do I slot into things? Like, where can I help? What's going wrong? How can I help something go right?"
And if you don't do that, if you outsource that process to a bureaucracy, to an incentive structure, to the ambient norms of the culture around you, you have declined a key quest of human existence.
And to me, that's just loser behavior… that is allowing someone else to colonize your value system in such a way that you are giving up this key part of your identity.
source: EconTalk Podcast
tags: #philosophy #morality #human-nature
260717
An Inscrutable Omen
In July 1992, I read The Road Less Traveled, and the last section of the book is about whether God exists.
I finished the book on a Sunday. I want to emphasize that I was really into the book, and after finishing I kept thinking about that last section about God.
· · ·
Monday morning I went to work at the Daily Camera newspaper, doing advertising design.
As usual, on my break I did the next day's crossword puzzle (a perk of working at a newspaper).
I couldn't get one square of the crossword. The clue was "a famous French Illustrator", G_DE. It was infuriating — the missing letter didn't have a second clue.
Then I read the next day's Calvin and Hobbes (also a perk of working at a newspaper):
I had moved to a new apartment over the weekend, and I had two boxes of books that I wanted to sell.
When my break came, I drove down to Pearl St. and double parked in front of the bookstore. I dropped off the two boxes, then came back out to move the car.
Returning to the bookstore on foot, I had to wait for two young women to walk by, in front of the door.
As they passed, one said (quite clearly) to the other: "Have you read The Road Less Traveled?"
I entered the bookstore, saw that the clerk was occupied, walked straight across the room and pulled a random book out of the shelves.
Litterally one second after hearing the two girls, I saw on the cover, much larger than the name of the author, "Illustrated by André Gide".