Francis Ford Coppola’s film “Apocalypse Now” was inspired by Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad about a European named Kurtz who penetrated to the farthest reaches of the Congo and established himself like a god. A boat sets out to find him, and on the journey the narrator gradually loses confidence in orderly civilization; he is oppressed by the great weight of the jungle all around him, a pitiless Darwinian testing ground in which each living thing tries every day not to be eaten.
What is found at the end of the journey is not Kurtz so much as what Kurtz found: that all of our days and ways are a fragile structure perched uneasily atop the hungry jaws of nature that will thoughtlessly devour us. A happy life is a daily reprieve from this knowledge.
I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.
Every murder is a form of self-hate.
Fear is like a fire. It can cook your supper or burn your house down.
It is only at the last moment that we learn to reflect - a trait fatal to humanity.
True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure - the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.
We had Batman on one side, saying that Harvey Dent represents a good vision of what the city can become, and then we had the Joker on the other side, saying that any man can be corrupted and turned into a villain if you push him hard enough.
No one will ever know the violence it took to become this gentle.
Finally, providing top-down guidance with such obvious contradictions backfires exactly because lack of trust is what fuels hoarding and misinformation. It used to be said that back in the Soviet Union, if there was a line, you first got in line and then figured out what the line was for - people knew that there were going to be shortages and that the authorities often lied, so they hoarded. And when people feel as though they may not be getting the full truth from the authorities, snake-oil sellers and price gougers have an easier time.
Given that there is indeed a mask shortage and that medical workers absolutely do need these masks more, what should the authorities have said? The full painful truth.
could someone explain this to me? i understand that longing for someone whose gone is love, but how is that better than the actual love of being with them?
It’s not better, but it’s beautiful, the pain you feel is the proof that you loved and loved as deeply as the pain hurts you now
The body operates as efficiently as possible. This means that your body is inherently lazy. Keeping your body at 98F provides enough heat to allow your metabolic reactions to proceed without fatiguing you too much. Fevers are your body’s way of activating its emergency immune reactions and accelerating them. While it is true that a fever over 105 will start to kill you, your body’s metabolism is most efficient around 102F. It takes an exceedingly higher amount of energy to maintain that temperature though.
TLDR: your body heats up in an emergency to get all of the cells firing at peak efficiency to fight off infection.
You can think that one degree is not that much, but sometimes one degree is a lot. Plenty of things have a boundary, and you can always get right up against that boundary so that one more whatever means a lot. There’s a point where you remain standing on a roof, but one millimeter farther and you plummet off the roof to death or serious injury. The fact that a millimeter is usually thought of as a small distance doesn’t matter.
There’s nothing that makes one degree, or one millimeter, inherently small.
Cells denature at 41C, with the normal body temperature at 37C. Once you get to 41C proteins lose their ability to function and that small difference is huge.
- Always keep learning
- Deserve what you want
- Know the edge of your own competency
- Be a survivor
- Practice the right approach
- Understand what you are doing
- Invest in trust
- Know all of the big ideas
- Swim as competently as you can
- Don’t submerge into self pity
Remember the facts and don’t base it on emotion.
Use your sensitivity for good. Channel your sense of empathy into a career, perhaps. And realize being sensitive really isn’t the worst trait. You’re only going to be human and there are less desirable traits to have. Ask yourself, “is this going to matter in a couple years? Scratch that, a couple minutes?” If it’s not, just shrug it off.
Furthermore, ask yourself what the intentions of the person are. Is it just playful, lighthearted banter? Shrug it off, maybe joke back and learn to roll with the punches. If you can’t, just tell them you had a problem with it. If it’s the truth, try and process it constructively.
Moments transcend space and time when a human live them.
This assistance was described as “the greatest transfer of technology in world history.” The Soviet Union spent 7% of its national income between 1954 and 1959 on aid to China. On his 1954 visit to China, Khrushchev agreed to return Port Arthur and Dalian to China, though he was annoyed by Mao’s insistence that the Soviets leave their artillery as they departed.
In older books, like Pride and Prejudice, part of the attractiveness of a classy male was the lack of muscle bulk or definition, as only a laborer would have the unsightly bulging sinews of a field animal.
Warren Buffett. Build a persona and a story and use that to make almost-free profits.
I used to ask him why he’d left his business empire. He said it was all for nothing. He said he just wanted to do something when he was young, but after his business grew too big it was no longer fun and he realized it was all for nothing. According to him, the world of business is a battle field. He won every battle, but didn’t win the war of life.
Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever. That surrender, even the smallest act of giving up, stays with me. So when I feel like quitting, I ask myself, which would I rather live with this?
Books had existed prior to Gutenberg, but they were not widely written and they were not widely read. Instead, they were luxury items for the nobility, produced one copy at a time by scribes. The going rate for reproducing a single manuscript was about one florin (a gold coin worth about $200 in today’s dollars) per five pages, so a book like the one you’re reading now would cost around $20K.
The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have “too much information” is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.
The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning. Like Caesar, we may construe them in self-serving ways that are detached from their objective reality.
Data-driven predictions can succeed - and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves.
I think it’s an age thing. That generation of players had a different attitude that the current one and Jose could never completely come to grips with that. His style of tough love is not really a good encouragement tool anymore.
SAF explains in his book about how he had to adapt to players’ attitudes and the importance of having assistant managers who are more in tune with them.
Most people are too wrapped up in their own lives and insecurities to focus on you.
When I try to think of other people’s embarrassing moments, it’s actually quite hard to do. And if I do think of something, I don’t dwell on it or give it more than a fleeting thought - it’s usually no big deal. It’s kind of nice to know that no one really gives a shit and maybe that one cringey thing I once said isn’t actually that big of a deal.
Related note - when I realized that I would never talk to someone they way I talk to myself, it was a little lightbulb moment. Self compassion is a long road.
Basically I was sitting around, waiting to be invited to something. More often than not, I’d end up just sitting around. I’d wonder why I’m not more popular, what I was doing wrong. Until I realized that so many other people I knew were doing the same thing: waiting around, waiting to be invited to something. So I tried something. I planned a movie night at my apartment, and sent out an invitation. Lots of people joined, and were eager to have something to do. Which leads me to my thesis:
Plan Your Own Shit.
Just try it. It doesn’t have to be anything big. In fact, it’s probably better to start small.
When you organize things and give people something to do, you’re giving them something valuable. People like people who are valuable to them. You’ll probably find yourself better liked and more respected, and you’ll probably find yourself invited to more things by the people you meet and grow closer to. People who are really good at this often have very robust friend networks. I’ve known a few people like this in my life, and they all had active and fulfilling social lives. They befriended me using the techniques that I’ve outlined, and I was always extremely grateful to them.
Lastly, it gets easier. The first time you plan something, it might be scary or stressful. Start small and easy, and work your way up. In the beginning, you might feel like you have to do everything yourself, but as you meet and grow closer to more people, you’ll meet people who plan things and invite you.
A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies become unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying - lying to others and to yourself.
Evolution, whether by natural selection or artificial, whether in species or in ideas, is all around us.
It happens slowly. Usually more slowly than we’re aware of, and definitely more slowly than we have the patience for.
Drip by drip isn’t a crowd pleaser, but that’s what makes real change happen.
One reason the mafia survives is that certain businesses and politicians have found the mafia useful. Many industries are locally controlled by the mafia and businesses and politicians are tempted to work with them in order to keep the peace.
Back in the days of the Cold War the FBI was more worried about Communists than about the mafia. Today, they may be more worried about terrorists.
Law enforcement may still prosecute lower level criminals but lack the will or resources to go after the top level bosses. Businessmen just want to make money and for a price the mafia will make sure they have no union troubles or other work disruptions. There are a lot of people looking the other way to get things done.
In some countries crime organizations may have a working relationship with the national government. This is sometimes called a mafia state.
Most of your friends will be temporary and that’s ok. Not every friendship needs to be “I’ll love you to the end.” Some of them are just for a few months. Seasons of your life.
- If you care less in a relationship you would have more power than other.
- If you don’t love yourself no one is going to love you.
- You can’t change other people no matter what
- The cute little flukes of today can be the soul-crushing mistakes of tomorrow.
- We will all eventually become old and attractive in the eyes of society
- The less you care about a particular person (man/woman), the easier it is to end up with her.
- Both sexes are easy to manipulate with the same principles that marketers use to sell us crap - scarcity, commitment, reciprocity, authority, social proof and liking.
- Men will never know how it feels to be a woman and same is with women.
- Love, dating, and relationship can’t be “figured out” logically. They require empathy, vulnerability, and honesty.
How do you process deeply set regret?
You can only move forward. There won’t be any benefit in wishing you could change the way you acted in the past, so the first step is to accept that you did whatever is causing you regret.
Now that you’ve accepted your past actions, you can turn your gaze forward. You can work to make things right, work to forgive yourself, and work to better yourself so you cause less harm in the future.
The most vitally characteristic fact about mathematics is, in my opinion, its quite peculiar relationship to the natural sciences, or, more generally, to any science which interprets experience on a higher than purely descriptive level.
Most people, mathematicians and others, will agree that mathematics is not an empirical science, or at least that it is practiced in a manner which differs in several decisive respects from the techniques of the empirical sciences. And, yet, its development is very closely linked with the natural sciences. One of its main branches, geometry, actually started as a natural, empirical science. Some of the best inspirations of modern mathematics (I believe, the best ones) clearly originated in the natural sciences. The methods of mathematics pervade and dominate the “theoretical” divisions of the natural sciences. In modern empirical sciences it has become more and more a major criterion of success whether they have become accessible to the mathematical method or to the near-mathematical methods of physics. Indeed, throughout the natural sciences an unbroken chain of successive pseudomorphoses, all of them pressing toward mathematics, and almost identified with the idea of scientific progress, has become more and more evident. Biology becomes increasingly pervaded by chemistry and physics, chemistry by experimental and theoretical physics, and physics by very mathematical forms of theoretical physics.
There is a quite peculiar duplicity in the nature of mathematics. One has to realize this duplicity, to accept it, and to assimilate it into one’s thinking on the subject. This double face is the face of mathematics, and I do not believe that any simplified, unitarian view of the thing is possible without sacrificing the essence.
I have told the story of this controversy in such detail, because I think that it constitutes the best caution against taking the immovable rigour of mathematics too much fro granted. This happened in our own lifetime, and I know myself how humiliatingly easily my own views regarding the absolute mathematical truth changed during this episode, and how they changed three times in succession!
I hope that the above three examples illustrate one-half of my thesis sufficiently well - that much of the best mathematical inspiration comes from experience and that it is hardly possible to believe in the existence of an absolute, immutable concept of mathematical rigour, dissociated from all human experience.
Chinese leaders read and re-read Sun Zi’s Art of War. They know it is absolutely necessary to understand war and be prepared for it but he is a fool who enters into war lightly; and war, once entered into, unleashes forces which are often beyond your control. The superior leader is one who achieves his objective without having to use military force, better still without the other party feeling that he has lost. Chinese statecraft avoids major surgery when there are problems, preferring instead to twiddle acupuncture points and prescribe bitter herbs. But we must expect that as China becomes more powerful, its officials will become more assertive especially towards smaller countries.
I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann’s does not indicate a species superior to that of man.
von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us.
You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can! And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, so you can see how impressive Johnny is!
When his crews were not flying missions, they were subjected to relentless training, as LeMay believed that training was the key to saving their lives. “You train as you fight” was one of his cardinal rules. It expressed his belief that, in the chaos, stress and confusion of combat (aerial or otherwise), troops or airmen would perform successfully only if their individual acts were second-nature, performed nearly instinctively due to repetitive training.
A generation of innocent young men, their heads full of high abstractions like Honour, Glory and England, went off to war to make the world safe for democracy. They were slaughtered in stupid battles planned by stupid generals. Those who survived were shocked, disillusioned and embittered by their war experiences, and saw that their real enemies were not the Germans, but the old men at home who had lied to them. They rejected the values of the society that had sent them to war, and in doing so separated their own generation from the past and from their cultural inheritance.
Grand romantic gestures don’t convince someone who’s on the fence about you that you’re worth it. Just that you’re probably a nut case.
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
The reason that students at Yale and place like it can “afford” to major in history is that they have the luxury of seeing college as a chance to learn about the world beyond the confines of their hometowns, and to try to understand where they might fit in. That’s what history does best. It locates us and helps us understand how we got here and why things are they way they are. History instills a sense of citizenship, and reminds you of questions to ask, especially about evidence.
Maps are necessary, but flawed. (By maps, we mean any abstraction of reality, including descriptions, theories, models, etc.) The problem with a map is not simply that it is an abstraction; we need abstraction. A map with the scale of one mile to one mile would not have the problems that maps have, nor would it be helpful in any way.
To solve this problem, the mind creates maps of reality in order to understand it, because the only way we can process the complexity is through abstraction. But frequently, we don’t understand our maps or their limits. In fact, we are so reliant on abstraction that we will frequently use an incorrect model simply because we feel any model is preferable to no model.
Human brain takes great leaps and shortcuts in order to make sense of its surroundings. As Charlie Munger has pointed out, a good idea and the human mind act something like the sperm and the egg - after the first good idea gets in, the door closes. This makes the map-territory problem a close cousin of man-with-a-hammer tendency.
For many people, the model creates its own reality. It is as if the spreadsheet comes to life. We forget that reality is a lot messier. The map isn’t the territory. The theory isn’t what it describes, it’s simply a way we choose to interpret a certain set of information. Maps can also be wrong, but even if they are essentially correct, they are an abstraction, and abstraction means that information is lost to save space.
You do not understand a model, map, or reduction unless you understand and respect its limitations.
The determining factor for a Thinker (historian, philosopher, scientist, writer, artist, et al.) to be considered a public intellectual is the degree to which he or she is implicated and engaged with the vital reality of the contemporary world; that is to say, participation in the public affairs of society. Consequently, being designated as a public intellectual is determined by the degree of influence of the designator’s motivations, opinions, and options of action (social, political, ideological), and by affinity with the given thinker.
The Intellectual is someone who meddles with what does not concern them.
The fact that my progress in life, emotional, mental and physical, is completely and wholly my responsibility. No one really pushes you to do the right thing - it’s ridiculously daunting.
Our confidence comes from out preparation.
The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.
Look up the word confidence, and it becomes clear the word means belief or trust in one’s own ability to do… to have… to be.
The dictionary is the only place where Confidence comes before Preparation.
You don’t need an app, you need someone gently to tell you that you should consider the possibility that writing is not just about writing, it’s also (and maybe mainly) about the space in between the writing, when nothing seems to be happening, or random stuff is having an incoherent party inside your head.
When you’re doing scary creative work, or work that requires emotional labor, it’s natural to want to walk away a bit. To distract yourself. To go shave a yak, mindlessly eat or bother someone in the next cube.
Tôi cứ nghĩ khi sống bế tắc thì khi chết xong sẽ được giải thoát, cảm thấy nhẹ nhàng, thanh thản nhưng hoàn toàn ngược lại, khi sống cảm thấy thế nào, thì khi chết xong sẽ còn tệ hơn như thế. Chết là kết thúc cái khác nhưng tâm thức vẫn cứ như vậy.