I thought I knew everything about death. Then grief struck me
Even though I grew up in Death World, and still live there, it couldn’t prepare me for being my family’s sole survivor
Here is the challenge before me: to explain death and dying and the past five years of my life in approximately 1,500 words. I opened my book Technologies of the Human Corpse (2020) with the following line: ‘I needed to finish this book before my entire family died.’ Now, in 2023, all of my family is, in fact, entirely dead.
Just finished Big Fish (The book was good, but the movie had a better ending) and The Dragon Republic (2nd book in The Poppy War series). It's a fantasized version of Chinese history, that really focus a lot on the brutality of war. Here's a bit of infor for anyone that enjoys fantasy novels and unfiltered looks at history.
Now for something a little lighter. I started "A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" last night. About 50 pages in and it's been enjoyable so far. More character development than plot.
"Cooking isn't about struggling; It's about pleasure. It's like sǝx, with a wider variety of sauces."
At any given time the urge to sing "In The Jungle" is just a whim away... A whim away... A whim away...
‘If misinformation does behave like a virus, then we can also create a vaccine’
Sander van der Linden studies how and why people share misinformation – research that he outlines in detail in his new book, Foolproof (Fourth Estate). Interview by science writer David Robson
At the centre of your thesis is the idea that misinformation acts like a like a virus of the mind. In what ways is this an apt metaphor?
When they hear about my work, some people think this is a kind of a catchy metaphor that came out of the times that we're living in – but I wrote most of the book before the pandemic.
People have been studying how information behaves like a virus for a long time, and it’s interesting how literal that analogy is. We can use models from epidemiology without any or much adaptation and they work really well in explaining how misinformation spreads. And then, on the belief level, there are analogies to the ways viruses attack host cells; they take over some of the machinery with the goal of reproducing themselves. I think that happens to some people who basically get so consumed by conspiracy theories, that it takes over part of their cognition. Their memory and perception can be distorted and it alters the way they behave so that they reproduce the misinformation.
Quite a few of those “conspiracy theories” have been proven true. So it sounds to me that the purpose of a so-called vaccine for this sort of thing is to make the mind impotent. I guess categorizing people that think for themselves as being stricken by a virus would help to vilify them further. Of course though, they would never force a free thinker vaccine on people. I mean hell, they’d never do something like that.
"The times of physics and of evolution are incompatible. But this has not always been obvious because physics and evolution deal with different kinds of objects. Physics, particularly quantum mechanics, deals with simple and elementary objects: quarks, leptons and force carrier particles of the Standard Model. Because these objects are considered simple, they do not require ‘memory’ for the Universe to make them (assuming sufficient energy and resources are available). Think of ‘memory’ as a way to describe the recording of actions or processes that are needed to build a given object. When we get to the disciplines that engage with evolution, such as chemistry and biology, we find objects that are too complex to be produced in abundance instantaneously (even when energy and materials are available). They require memory, accumulated over time, to be produced. As Darwin understood, some objects can come into existence only through evolution and the selection of certain ‘recordings’ from memory to make them.
This incompatibility creates a set of problems that can be solved only by making a radical departure from the current ways that physics approaches time – especially if we want to explain life."
@Rdp77 said:
Quite a few of those “conspiracy theories” have been proven true. So it sounds to me that the purpose of a so-called vaccine for this sort of thing is to make the mind impotent. I guess categorizing people that think for themselves as being stricken by a virus would help to vilify them further. Of course though, they would never force a free thinker vaccine on people. I mean hell, they’d never do something like that.
This touches on, or perhaps runs parallel to something that's been on my mind lately.
I recently caught a portion of an NPR special (I think) that included information of the composer Schumann, and Scottish poet Robert Burns. Both were subject to extreme mood swings, periods of frantic creativity alternating with times of deep depression.
This really caught my attention, as I've been in contact with an old friend from High School who is similar. He comes up with seemingly insane, but often brilliant ideas, very nearly makes them work, and then it all disintegrates in the mania. He rarely meets with lasting success, I guess never meets it would be more accurate. The doctors he's seen all prescribe something, something to make him just "normal", which doesn't really help because, well, he's not.
This is todays approach, make everybody the same. But are we robbing ourselves of possibly great things? Schumann wrote something like 26 symphonies in about a years time, while manic. Where did Burns poetry come from? The times when his brain was just like everyone else? I don't think so.
Rather than medicate into mediocrity, might we not be better off teaching individuals coping strategies that allow their abilities to flourish, while trying to understand and cope with the low points?
WARNING: The above post may contain thoughts or ideas known to the State of Caliphornia to cause seething rage, confusion, distemper, nausea, perspiration, sphincter release, or cranial implosion to persons who implicitly trust only one news source, or find themselves at either the left or right political extreme. Proceed at your own risk.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
Found this 1961 cookbook on my coffee table, looks like an interesting read and appears to be a collection of recipes from famous restaurants from bygone years.
Join us on Zoom vHerf (Meeting # 2619860114 Password vHerf2020 )
@Yakster said:
Found this 1961 cookbook on my coffee table, looks like an interesting read and appears to be a collection of recipes from famous restaurants from bygone years.
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (July 13, 1798)
By William Wordsworth
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.—I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance—
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence—wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
Comments
I thought I knew everything about death. Then grief struck me
Even though I grew up in Death World, and still live there, it couldn’t prepare me for being my family’s sole survivor
Here is the challenge before me: to explain death and dying and the past five years of my life in approximately 1,500 words. I opened my book Technologies of the Human Corpse (2020) with the following line: ‘I needed to finish this book before my entire family died.’ Now, in 2023, all of my family is, in fact, entirely dead.
https://psyche.co/ideas/i-thought-i-knew-everything-about-death-then-grief-struck-me
Just finished Big Fish (The book was good, but the movie had a better ending) and The Dragon Republic (2nd book in The Poppy War series). It's a fantasized version of Chinese history, that really focus a lot on the brutality of war. Here's a bit of infor for anyone that enjoys fantasy novels and unfiltered looks at history.
Now for something a little lighter. I started "A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" last night. About 50 pages in and it's been enjoyable so far. More character development than plot.
At any given time the urge to sing "In The Jungle" is just a whim away... A whim away... A whim away...
‘If misinformation does behave like a virus, then we can also create a vaccine’
Sander van der Linden studies how and why people share misinformation – research that he outlines in detail in his new book, Foolproof (Fourth Estate). Interview by science writer David Robson
At the centre of your thesis is the idea that misinformation acts like a like a virus of the mind. In what ways is this an apt metaphor?
When they hear about my work, some people think this is a kind of a catchy metaphor that came out of the times that we're living in – but I wrote most of the book before the pandemic.
People have been studying how information behaves like a virus for a long time, and it’s interesting how literal that analogy is. We can use models from epidemiology without any or much adaptation and they work really well in explaining how misinformation spreads. And then, on the belief level, there are analogies to the ways viruses attack host cells; they take over some of the machinery with the goal of reproducing themselves. I think that happens to some people who basically get so consumed by conspiracy theories, that it takes over part of their cognition. Their memory and perception can be distorted and it alters the way they behave so that they reproduce the misinformation.
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/if-misinformation-does-behave-virus-then-we-can-also-create-vaccine
https://aeon.co/essays/the-distinctive-paradox-of-swedish-individualism
Political philosophy
Essay
The Swedish theory of love
All countries must balance the freedom of individuals with the demands of the community. Sweden’s solution is unique
by Lars Trägårdh
I just finished reading The Reagans: Portrait of a Marriage. It's an interesting one, full of insights.
"Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another." - Proverbs 27:17
Quite a few of those “conspiracy theories” have been proven true. So it sounds to me that the purpose of a so-called vaccine for this sort of thing is to make the mind impotent. I guess categorizing people that think for themselves as being stricken by a virus would help to vilify them further. Of course though, they would never force a free thinker vaccine on people. I mean hell, they’d never do something like that.
about time
https://aeon.co/essays/time-is-not-an-illusion-its-an-object-with-physical-size
"The times of physics and of evolution are incompatible. But this has not always been obvious because physics and evolution deal with different kinds of objects. Physics, particularly quantum mechanics, deals with simple and elementary objects: quarks, leptons and force carrier particles of the Standard Model. Because these objects are considered simple, they do not require ‘memory’ for the Universe to make them (assuming sufficient energy and resources are available). Think of ‘memory’ as a way to describe the recording of actions or processes that are needed to build a given object. When we get to the disciplines that engage with evolution, such as chemistry and biology, we find objects that are too complex to be produced in abundance instantaneously (even when energy and materials are available). They require memory, accumulated over time, to be produced. As Darwin understood, some objects can come into existence only through evolution and the selection of certain ‘recordings’ from memory to make them.
This incompatibility creates a set of problems that can be solved only by making a radical departure from the current ways that physics approaches time – especially if we want to explain life."
My phone keeps the time for me.
Trapped in the People's Communist Republic of Massachusetts.
This touches on, or perhaps runs parallel to something that's been on my mind lately.
I recently caught a portion of an NPR special (I think) that included information of the composer Schumann, and Scottish poet Robert Burns. Both were subject to extreme mood swings, periods of frantic creativity alternating with times of deep depression.
This really caught my attention, as I've been in contact with an old friend from High School who is similar. He comes up with seemingly insane, but often brilliant ideas, very nearly makes them work, and then it all disintegrates in the mania. He rarely meets with lasting success, I guess never meets it would be more accurate. The doctors he's seen all prescribe something, something to make him just "normal", which doesn't really help because, well, he's not.
This is todays approach, make everybody the same. But are we robbing ourselves of possibly great things? Schumann wrote something like 26 symphonies in about a years time, while manic. Where did Burns poetry come from? The times when his brain was just like everyone else? I don't think so.
Rather than medicate into mediocrity, might we not be better off teaching individuals coping strategies that allow their abilities to flourish, while trying to understand and cope with the low points?
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
“The Money Shot” by Stuart Woods and Parnell Hall.
Sorry must have fat fingered this one.
“High Profile” by Robert Parker.
Found this 1961 cookbook on my coffee table, looks like an interesting read and appears to be a collection of recipes from famous restaurants from bygone years.
How did it get on the coffee table?
I'm not sure, I think it was in the bookcase and a family member pulled it out to look at it. It was a surprise.
There was a $6 price tag on the back from a local thrift store so I think it's a recent purchase.
My neighbor lived to be 109. This is what I learned from him
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/22/david-von-drehle-book-excerpt-dr-charlie-white/
“No Man’s Land” by David Baldacci.
“The 23rd Midnight” by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro.
"Burner" by Mark Greaney a Grey Man novel
friggin' humans just won't stop until everyone is miserable:
Chinese Next-Generation Psychological Warfare
The Military Applications of Emerging Technologies and Implications for the United States
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA853-1.html
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (July 13, 1798)
By William Wordsworth
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.—I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance—
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence—wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
Book: https://amzn.to/45yJGfE
Lyrical Ballads, first published in1798.
“Dark Angel” by John Sanford. A Letty Davenport novel.
Cat Among the Pigeons, by Agatha Christie
"Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another." - Proverbs 27:17
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/06/06/pga-tour-agrees-to-merge-with-saudi-backed-rival-liv-golf.html
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/graphics/2023/06/02/firefly-lightning-bug-extinction-explained/70257108007/
Trapped in the People's Communist Republic of Massachusetts.
Just in time for the MKE Herf. I expect some good research from our feet on the street out there.
“A Wanted Man” by Lee Child.
I'm feelings like an underachiever...
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/31/mike-wimmer-productivity-video-games-young-college-graduate.html
14-year-old finished high school and college in 3 years while running 2 companies—why video games are part of his routine