jamesakirk's comments

Emily Dickinson would tend to disagree:

؜

Crumbling is not an instant's Act

A fundamental pause

Dilapidation's processes

Are organized Decays —

؜

'Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul

A Cuticle of Dust

A Borer in the Axis

An Elemental Rust —

؜؜؜

Ruin is formal — Devil's work

Consecutive and slow —

Fail in an instant, no man did

Slipping — is Crashe's law —

> I don't think I could survive an amputation on modern cannabis alone, however.

It's not an all-or-nothing proposition.

My dad was a cancer patient with severe chronic pain. Cannabis did not eliminate the need for opiates for chronic pain, but reduced the amount of opiates he needed by about half. Using cannabis actually allowed him to be MORE lucid.

Good point.

You can stably suspend graphite pencil lead on permanent magnetic fields. E.G.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeIizmhzPQc

This notion reduces the totality of human interaction to language. Do you think proto-huminoids who hadn't developed complex language felt lonely because they lacked an ability to explain themselves?

If I become a duller and less complicated person, will I be able to more easily explain myself, and therefore less lonely? Absurd.

There are many ways to bond with others that are non-verbal.

Mad Magazine did this in 1963... "If kids designed their own Xmas toys": https://imgur.com/gallery/45RGR

Thank you for mentioning J. Nathan Kutz! Reading through this article, I saw similarities to Dynamic Mode Decomposition (I am not literate enough on the topic to elaborate). His Coursera courses and book were a fascinating dive into orthogonal basis functions, lower-rank approximations like PCA... I'm not sharp enough anymore (over a decade since grad school) to fully grok it, but damn his work is so cool!

Yeast has been genetically modified to produce psilocybin ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109671761... ). Researches have yielded the equivalent of about 60g dried shroom in only 1 liter of solution. When psychedelics become as easy to produce as beer, the world is gonna be a whole lot weirder.

Counterexample: It is impossible to understand a new language without memorization. Memorization is critical, but it is not sufficient.

Which polls? Please be specific. Are the polling methods and results beyond the influence of Russian State?

Further, even if they are correct, to what extent is their response based on incorrect or insufficient information (which I strongly suspect)?

I'm running Chrome on Win10 and my records survived the migration, so your mileage may vary.

Tarkovsky was an Orthodox Christian, but his ideas about the irreducibility of experience parallel Zen:

"Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn't have to answer for his meanings. I don't think so deeply about my work - I don't know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch into pieces, it doesn't work. Similarly with a work of art, there's no way it can be analyzed without destroying it."

- Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, pg. 71 Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2006

Edit: as others have pointed out, my surprise at this parallel may tell you less about the uniqueness of Tarkovsky's world view, and more about my ignorance of Orthodox Christianity.

If you are a fan, I strongly recommend Weird Studies' 2-part episode on Stalker. Phil and JF generalize the concept of "the zone" and discuss other examples of zones in art.

Got anything to trade for them?

Same. It goes without saying perhaps, but one consideration is what type of social contact you want.

I work in a technical role and I miss my colleagues immensely. I feel best when I am around people I know, and when my job entails keeping a small group of people happy.

Working in sales, consulting, or relationship management is about working with strangers.... of balancing the joint demands of both your employer and the client. I get very self-critical and anxious in these roles.

breitbart.com is an approved news source on HN!?

You use your hand to clamp down one nostril. Lookup Nadi Shodhana.

Norbert Wiener discussed this in Cybernetics:

"Another example of a purely mechanical feedback system — the one originally treated by Clerk Maxwell — is that of the governor of a steam engine, which serves to regulate its velocity under varying conditions of load. In the original form designed by Watt, it consists of two balls attached to pendulum rods and swinging on opposite sides of a rotating shaft. They are kept down by their own weight or by a spring, and they are swung upward by a centrifugal action dependent on the angular velocity of the shaft. They thus assume a compromise position likewise dependent on the angular velocity. This position is transmitted by other rods to a collar about the shaft, which actuates a member which serves to open the intake valves of the cylinder when the engine slows down and the balls fall, and to close them when the engine speeds up and the balls rise. Notice that the feedback tends to oppose what the system is already doing, and is thus negative. "

(https://archive.org/details/CyberneticsOrCommunicationAndCon...)

There is a difference between awareness and judgement. What Tarkovsky is asking you to do is shut down your judgement to gain awareness. In the words of Alan Watts "You must go out of your mind to come to your senses." If by shallow you mean bringing your awareness to something other than your thoughts, you are correct.

Gaining awareness of emotions is the first step in understanding how thoughts and conditions induce emotional states. This understanding facilitates ownership of one's own emotional responses. Harsh self-judgement shuts down this process, which is why narcissists are incapable of self-reflection.

I think you have it backwards.

I discovered Tarkovsky only last year. I didn't "get" him until the death of my father. Roiling in ineffable grief, I struggled to find meaning, to sum up the arc of my father's life. The experience had (and still has) a timeless, absurd quality to it.

Tarkovsky's films seem to exist in a different type of time orthogonal to our own, and the experience of engaging with them is difficult to describe. They are both powerful and ineffable.

From his writings, he could be mistaken for a practitioner of Zen. I would like to share my favorite Tarkovsky quote:

"Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn't have to answer for his meanings. I don't think so deeply about my work - I don't know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch into pieces, it doesn't work. Similarly with a work of art, there's no way it can be analyzed without destroying it."