Supernovas briefly explained:
Once a massive star runs out of hydrogen in its core, gravity pulls the core inward, marking it dense enough and hot enough for its helium to fuse, making carbon and oxygen.
That is when the star becomes a red super-giant. Then the carbon and oxygen fuse to make sodium, magneisum, silicon and heavier elements. The final stage of fusion creates iron.
Fusing iron removes energy raher releasing it. With no energy source left to push outward against the force of gravity pulling inward, the star's core collapses.
The star's core suddenly collapses. The star's outer layers rush inward, collide, then blast outward again with immense energy. The star explodes into a supernova.
The shock wave can also help new stars to form. Interstellar gas compacted by the shock wave may clump together and gather more gas until it ignites as a star.
Many of the elements, from helium to iron, that were created in the star's interior are scattered into space, where they can be used by the next generation.
The calcium in our bones and the iron in our blood come from ancient supernovas.
"Le grand couturier qui entre dans l'Histoire est celui qui a su au moins une fois, transformer l'idee d'une epoque en un vêtement de femme." Extrait de La Creation de la Mode, par
Alain Soral
Old Tjikko, the 10K years old Norway spruce tree.
Interessante description philosophique du fascisme
Jordan Peterson on the illusion of not being judgmental within millennials
"Although I may have difficulty remembering details of a walk I took just a few hours ago, I have no difficulty recalling all of these many steps in preparing for bed - so much so that I am able to think about other things while I go through these procedures. It is important to point out that this list is not stored as one long list of thousands of steps -
rather, each of our routine procedures is remembered as an elaborate hierarchy of nested activities.
The same type of hierarchy is involved in our ability to recognize objects and situations. We recognize the faces of people we know well and also recognize that these faces contain eyes, a nose, a mouth, and so on - a hierarchy of patterns that we use in both our perceptions and our actions.
The use of hierarchies allows us to reuse patterns. For example, we do not need to relearn the concept of a nose and a mouth each time we are introduced to a new face."
How to create a mind,
Ray Kurweil
Things that we hate or passionately love are essentially concealed programs that are awaiting to be understood (fractioned then rewired) later on in our lives.
As spinoza says, once we understand the root causes of our passions, we are no longer enslaved by them and start becoming truly free.
Wouldn't be preferable to have an America cut in half, twice less politically and economically influent, and with a double happiness rate per citizen ?
Order from Chaos by Max Cooper describing the phenomenon of Emergence
Dans une société qui exige que l’on se soumette à certaines règles dans les rapports sociaux, mais qui refuse d’ancrer ces règles dans un code de conduite morale, l’individu doit lutter pour maintenir son équilibre psychique ; cela favorise une forme de concentration sur soi qui ressemble peu au narcissisme primaire du moi impérial. Des éléments archaïques dominent de manière croissante la structure de la personnalité. « Le moi se recroqueville, écrit Morris Dickstein, vers un état primaire et passif dans lequel le monde n’est ni créé ni formé. » Le moi impérial, dévoreur d’expériences et maniaque de lui-même, régresse vers un autre moi, vide, infantile, narcissique, grandiose :
Assailli par l’anxiété, la dépression, un mécontentement vague et un sentiment de vide intérieur, « l’homme psychologique » du XXe siècle ne cherche vraiment ni son propre développement ni une transcendance spirituelle, mais la paix de l’esprit, dans des conditions de plus en plus défavorables. Ses principaux alliés, dans sa lutte pour atteindre un équilibre personnel, ne sont ni les prêtres, ni les apôtres de l’autonomie, ni des modèle de réussite du type capitaines d’industrie ; ce sont les thérapeutes. Il se tourne vers ces derniers dans l’espoir de parvenir à cet équivalent moderne du salut : « la santé mentale ».
La culture du narcissisme,
Christopher
Lasch
Proof of the Kahn-Kalai conjecture
published by
Stanford
researchers.
"Just as ice crystals form when the temperature dips below zero degrees Celsius, the emergence of a particular property suddenly becomes extremely likely as more edges get added to the graph. When edges are added to a random graph of N vertices with a probability of less than log(N)/N, for instance, the graph is unlikely to contain a Hamiltonian cycle. But when that probability is adjusted to be just a hair greater than log(N)/N, a Hamiltonian cycle becomes extremely likely."
Yann Lecun on the importance of emotions creating uncertainty to power up intelligence.
Puissante critique de
Frederic Lenoir (partagee egalement avec Henri Bergson) sur l'opinion de Spinoza vis-a-vis de la religion.
"J’ajouterai que Spinoza a sans doute aussi sous-estimé le rôle précieux que joue la religion en créant des « communions humaines », selon la jolie formule de mon ami Régis Debray. Au-delà d’une cohésion sociale purement rationnelle à laquelle aspire Spinoza, la religion relie les individus dans une ferveur émotionnelle, qui crée aussi un lien d’affects entre les individus et pas seulement de raison. Pour en revenir au judaïsme, pour beaucoup de juifs, être juif ne signifie pas tant croire en Dieu et pratiquer la Torah en vue du salut qu’observer les traditions familiales et communautaires, afin
d’intégrer une dimension identitaire collective dans la vie quotidienne à travers des rites et des symboles. Et ce sentiment d’appartenance a plus à voir avec les affects qu’avec la seule raison."
Yann Lecun on the importance of "grounding" for
language production and understanding.
"Spurious dogmas will be touched lightly with the spear of Ithuriel, and no longer squat around the ears of
weary ploughmen."
Source
"To learn a language in a human and mature way, therefore, is to accept the responsibility for its silences and for its sounds. The gift a people gives us in teaching us their language is more a gift of the rhythm, the mode and the subtleties of its system of silences than of its system of sounds. It is an intimate gift for which we are accountable to the people who have entrusted us with their tongue. A language of which I know only the words and not the pauses is a continous offence. It is as a caricature of a photographic negative." The Eloquence of Silence,
Ivan Illich
"The "absence of the ego", promoted by Zen, is not the equivalent of apathy or atony; but rather induces a higher form of spontaneity, self-assurance, freedom and calmness during action. It is like one who, after spasmodically grabbing onto something, eventually lets go and in doing so acquires an even higher sense of tranquillity, a higher form of freedom and of security. Thus, in the Far East there are traditional arts, which, on the one hand, originate from the freedom induced by Zen; on the other hand these arts are, per se, ways to achieve this very freedom through training and practice. As odd as it may seem, there is Zen in the art of drama, in the tea ceremony, in the arrangement of flowers, in archery, in wrestling (judo), in fencing and so on. All of these arts have a ritual dimension. Besides, in virtue of some inscrutable connections, a complete mastery in one of these arts cannot be achieved without the above-mentioned inner enlightenment and transformation of the sense which one has of his/her own self; this mastery eventually becomes a visible sign of such enlightenment."
Extract from Zen, The Religion of the Samurai by Julius Evola.
Analytical philosophy versus
Continental Philosophy
"It is difficult to identify non-trivial claims that would be common to all the preceding philosophical movements, but the primary distinguishing feature between continental philosophy and analytic philosophy are their opposing attitudes to objectivity.
The notion that the universe has a material existence regardless of whether humans exist or not, is rejected by foremost Continental philosophers (starting with Immanuel Kant), and accepted by Analytic philosophers."
Are animals living off plants or the opposite ?
"Tout philosophe a deux philosophies : la sienne et celle de Spinoza."
Henry Bergson
False consciousness:
"It is about concealing the exploitation intrinsic to the social relations between classes."
The Frankfurt School also provide useful historical perspectives on the transition from traditional culture and modernism in the arts to a mass-produced media and consumer society. In his path-breaking book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jurgen Habermas further historicizes Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the culture industry. Providing historical background to the triumph of the culture industry, Habermas notes how bourgeois society in the late 18th and 19th century was distinguished by the rise of a public sphere that stood between civil society and the state and which mediated between public and private interests.
For the first time in history, individuals and groups could shape public opinion, giving direct expression to their needs and interests while influencing political practice. The bourgeois public sphere made it possible to form a realm of public opinion that opposed state power and the powerful interests that were coming to shape bourgeois society.
Source
"Life is always right: it is the architect who is wrong"
Le Corbusier
"Il est facile de se rendre compte, tout d’abord, que les deux parties de la structure que nous venons de décrire figurent la terre et le ciel, auxquels correspondent en effet respectivement la forme carrée et la forme circulaire; et, bien que ce soit dans la tradition extrême-orientale que cette correspondance se trouve indiquée avec le plus d’insistance, elle est d’ailleurs fort loin de lui être exclusivement propre. Puisque nous venons de faire allusion à la tradition extrême-orientale, il n’est pas sans intérêt de signaler à ce propos que, en Chine, le vêtement des anciens empereurs devait être rond par le haut et carré dans le bas ; ce vêtement, en effet, avait une signification symbolique (de même que toutes les actions de leur vie, qui étaient réglées selon les rites), et cette signification était précisément la même que celle dont nous considérons ici la réalisation architecturale.
À cette signification générale, il s’en ajoute une autre encore plus précise : l’ensemble de l’édifice, envisagé de haut en bas, représente
le passage de l’Unité principielle (à laquelle correspond le point central ou le sommet du dôme, dont toute la voûte n’est en quelque sorte qu’une expansion) au quaternaire de la manifestation élémentaire ; inversement, si on l’envisage de bas en haut, c’est le retour de cette manifestation à l’Unité. À ce propos,
Coomaraswamy rappelle, comme ayant la même signification, le symbolisme vêdique des
trois Ribhus qui, de la coupe (pâtra) unique de Twashtri, firent quatre coupes (et dôme) ; le nombre ternaire, intervenant ici comme un intermédiaire entre l’Unité et le quaternaire, signifie notamment, en ce cas, que c’est seulement par le moyen des trois dimensions de l’espace que l’« un » originel peut être fait « quatre », ce qui est exactement figuré par le symbole de la croix à trois dimensions. Le processus inverse est représenté de même par la légende du Bouddha qui, ayant reçu quatre bols à aumônes des Mahârâjas des quatre points cardinaux en fit un seul bol, ce qui indique que, pour l’être « unifié », le « Graal » (pour employer le terme traditionnel occidental qui désigne évidemment l’équivalent de ce pâtra) est de nouveau unique comme il l’était au commencement, c’est-à-dire
au point de départ de la manifestation cosmique.
Rene Guenon,
Symbolisme du dome
"Il y a quatre sources de l'honnete, et tout ce qui merite ce nom derive de l'une d'elles. L'honnete, en effet, consiste 1 - ou dans le discernement et la science du vrai; 2 - ou dans l'attention a maintenir l'ordre social, en rendant a chacun ce qui lui est du et en respectant la foi des engagements; 3 - ou dans cette grandeur et cette force qui eleve l'ame et la rend invincible; 4 - ou dans cette convenance et cette mesure des paroles et des actions d'ou nait la moderation et la temperance. Sans doute, ces quatre principes se tiennent et rentrent l'un dans l'autre; cependant il nait de chacun d'eux des devoirs particuliers.
Ainsi, au principe que j'ai place le premier dans cette enumeration, et qui renferme la sagesse et la prudence, appartient la recherche et la decouverte de la verite, et c'est la comme la fonction speciale de cette vertu, et le fonds sur lequel s'exerce, pour ainsi dire, son industrie. Aux trois autres est imposee l'obligation de pourvoir aux besoins de la vie active, qui comprennent le maintien de la societe civile, l'agrandissement des fortunes privees, et la recherche pour soi-meme et pour les siens de ces avantages ou brillent la grandeur et la force de l'ame, quand on les acquiert, et plus encore quand on les meprise. Pour ce qui est de l'ordre, de la constance, de la moderation, ces qualites et celles qui leur ressemblent appartiennent a cette classe ou l'action est necessaire, et non pas seulement l'application de l'esprit. En effet, c'est en portant dans le choses de la vie la mesure et l'ordre convenables que nous conserverons l'honnetete et la bienseance."
Ciceron, Traite des devoirs
An incredible startup story from a good entrepreneur in America
"- Not directly. Of course I always have the best interests of my patients in mind, but, you know, it’s not like they’ll pay more if I prescribe Lexapro instead of Zoloft. They won’t come back more often or refer more friends. So I’d sorta just be, like, donating this money if I paid you for this thing, right?”
I had literally nothing to say to that. It had been a bit of a working assumption of mine over the past few weeks that if you could improve the health of the patients then, you know, the doctors or the hospitals or whatever would pay for that. There was this giant thing called healthcare right, and its main purpose is improving health—trillions of dollars are spent trying to do this. So if I built a thing that improves health someone should pay me, right?"
"A man once was invited to visit heaven and hell. First, he went to hell, where all the tormented souls were sitting at tables laden with food, yet they were starving and howling with hunger. Each soul had a spoon, but the spoons were so long that they couldn't get them into their mouths. Their frustration was their torment. In Heaven, to his amazement, the man found the souls of the blessed sitting at similar tables laden with food, but they were all fed and contented. Each had a spoon and the spoons were just as long as the spoons in hell, but they were able to eat all they needed because they were feeding each other."
"Now I believe these undetermined self-forming actions or SFAs occur at those difficult times of life when we are torn between competing visions of what we should do or become. Perhaps we are torn between doing the moral thing or acting from ambition, or between powerful present desires and long-term goals, or we are faced with difficult tasks for which we have aversions. In all such cases, we are faced with competing motivations and have to make an effort to overcome temptation to do something else we also strongly want. There is tension and uncertainty in our minds about what to do at such times, I suggest, that is reflected in appropriate regions of our brains by movement away from thermodynamic equilibrium — in short, a kind of "stirring up of chaos" in the brain that makes it sensitive to micro-indeterminacies at the neuronal level. The uncertainty and inner tension we feel at such soul-searching moments of self-formation is thus reflected in the indeterminacy of our neural processes themselves. What we experience internally as uncertainty about what to do on such occasions would then correspond physically to the opening of a window of opportunity that temporarily screens off complete determination by influences of the past."
Robert Kane
"I am interested in a world where Jimmy Hendrix solves quantum field theory equations." Eric Weinstein
"This sense of appreciating nature—petals falling on the ground along with the change of people’s lives, the delightfulness and gentle excitement of it all—is closely connected with the perishing of the moment, and decay. With this comes the emotion of melancholy. As Ki no Tsurayuki puts it in his preface, we are “startled into thoughts on the brevity of life”."
About Japan’s Cherry Blossom Viewing Parties
Rabbit in infinityland
2017 Cannes Festival Palme d'Or winner
"The
Square". Another good example of self-referential art.
"La plupart des gens, historiquement, n'ont pas vecu leurs vies comme s'ils pensaient "Je n'ai qu'une vie a
vivre". Au contraire, ils vivaient comme s'ils vivaient l'existence de leurs ancetres et celle de leurs
descendants."
Tom Wolfe
Ps: Les annees 1970s etaient considerees comme
La
Generation "Moi" selon Tom wolfe.
Le mot « dérivé » vient du latin « derivare » qui signifiait « détourner un
cours d’eau ».
Le mot a été introduit par le mathématicien franco-italien Joseph Louis
Lagrange (1736 ; 1813) pour signifier que cette nouvelle fonction dérive
(au sens de "provenir") d'une autre fonction.
Crows playing on solar panels
How
The “Uber Economy” Is Killing Innovation, Prosperity And Entrepreneurship
"Under conditions of perfect competition, the forces of supply and demand are supposed to drive markets toward equilibrium. It is at this magical point that prices are high enough to attract supply sufficient to satisfy demand, but not any higher.
Unfortunately for anyone running a business, that equilibrium point is the same point at which economic profit disappears. So to make a profit over the long-term, managers need to alter market dynamics either through limiting competition, often through strategies such as rent seeking and regulatory capture, or by creating new markets through innovation.
As should be clear by now, the digital revolution has been relatively ineffective at creating meaningful innovation. Economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo refer to technologies like Uber, as well as things like automated customer service, as “so-so technologies,” because they displace workers without significantly increasing productivity."
Schafe konnens sicher weiden / Sheep may safely graze - JS Bach
The article on Godel Machines by schmidhuber is a
must-read.
We present the first class of mathematically rigorous, general, fully self-referential, self-improving, optimally efficient problem solvers.
Inspired by Kurt Godel’s celebrated self-referential formulas (1931), such a problem solver rewrites any part of its own code as soon as it has found a proof that the rewrite is useful, where the problem-dependent utility function and the hardware and the entire initial code are described by axioms encoded in an initial proof searcher which is also part of the initial code.
The searcher systematically and in an asymptotically optimally efficient way tests computable proof techniques (programs whose outputs are proofs) until it finds a provably useful, computable self-rewrite.
We show that such a self-rewrite is globally optimal—no local maxima!—since the code first had to prove that it is not useful to continue the proof search for alternative self-rewrites.
Unlike Hutter’s previous non-self-referential methods based on hardwired proof searchers, ours not only boasts an opti- mal order of complexity but can optimally reduce any slowdowns hidden by the O()-notation, provided the utility of such speed-ups is provable at all.
Self-replicating code aka
Quines by Lex
fridman
10th Dan judo master
Kyuzo Mifune versus high-level
students.
"40 years ago, people were more open to the idea that not all knowledge all widely known. From the communist party to the Hare Krishnas, large numbers of people thought they could join some enlightened vanguard that would show them the Way. Very few people take unorthodox ideas seriously today, and the mainstream sees that as a sign of progress. We can be glad that there are fewer crazy cults now, yet that gain has come at great cost: we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered." Peter Thiel
You can either talk about a concept by describing its physical manifestations subjected to time (that's what the mainstream media does), or by successfully communicating the core intemporal principle from which it emanates.
Femme fractale by Jurgen Schmidhuber.
This is called
low-complexity art. Just imagine the compression rate comparing to its jpeg or png counterpart.
What if humanity was monitored at this very moment by a more technologically advanced and wiser civilization the same way these adventurers monitor chimps playing with their tools ?
"Let’s be clear: the new EARN IT Act would pave the way for a massive new surveillance system, run by private companies, that would roll back some of the most important privacy and security features in technology used by people around the globe. It’s a framework for private actors to scan every message sent online and report violations to law enforcement. And it might not stop there. The EARN IT Act could ensure that anything hosted online—backups, websites, cloud photos, and more—is scanned."
EARN
IT Act is back in 2022
Does the infinite nature of the universe dictates us to always remain at the quest of wiser knowledge ?
Talk by Robert Kane, expert in Human free-will with more than 40 years of experience in the question.
Can Libertarian Free Will Be Made Consistent With Modern Science ?
"Deus sive Natura"
Baruch Spinoza
The
bullroarer was an ancient communication tool
used over long distances.
Another example of minimalistic and robust ancient technology.
Brian greene on the world of information describing the world of mass and energy.
Richard Feynman's poetic view on fire.
yt-dlp, a faster and more ergonomic tool for downloading
youtube videos.
Ivan Illich on the professionalization and
specialization of society.
Schmidhuber on the simplicity of the rules by which the universe abides.
Philosophy, for the Stoics, essentially aims at the search for virtue, which refers to the right and reasonable action par excellence; any action is virtuous only insofar as it conforms to nature; this conformity to nature implies a submission of human reason to universal reason. This universal reason is otherwise called God by the Stoics, who profess a pantheism according to which everything that is, everything that happens, forms a body, is only a manifestation or a necessary effect of God.
To agree with reason or the divine order of nature amounts, for stoicism, to agreeing with oneself.
Cicero
"The center is, above all, the origin, the starting point of all things; it is the principal point, without form and without dimensions, therefore indivisible, and, consequently, the only image that can be given of the "primordial unity. From it, by its irradiation, all things are produced, just as unity produces all numbers, without its essence being modified or affected in any way."
Abdel Wahîd Yahyâ / Rene Guenon