… the ability to grow babies:
She will see daylight towards the end of May 2016 😀
Page 12 of 59
A liability of perfection is that trifles become important
While this is obvious when competing at a world class level, it is perhaps not so obvious in daily life.
When one is competing at the top in a sport, one is nearing perfection. Polishing of details will make the difference between a gold medal and a botched run. The details, even trifles, rise in importance.
And so it is with every life lived. If one gets to a point of polishing a comfortable life to perfection, trifles starts gaining importance. A detail out of place can become upsetting. Even the smallest setbacks can cause great upsets. And that is when you should wreck havoc to the status quo; Quit your job, move to another country, get horse, or a divorce, sail around the world, get involved in serious charity work, help people in the slums, do something crazy to make life less nitpicky. Because perfection has a few liabilities. And this is one of them.
What describes a successful person?
What are the qualities needed to be successful?
- What qualities are absolutely mandatory for success in any given field?
- What qualities are usually needed or would normally contribute to success?
I’d like your input on these two questions. I hope for a good brainstorming 🙂
What describes a person?
Resilience, happy, cooking, meek, sad, archery, personality, love, decision, feel, character, intelligence. Words that describe how a person is, what a person can do, or what characteristics, abilities or skills a person has.
I’m writing an article classifying various human descriptors. I’d like to ask you for help to extend the above list – not by furnishing mere synonyms, but by actually extending the list.
Thanks 🙂
What I want, I don’t have. What I have, I don’t want.
I suspect the reason people are longing for calmness, mindfulness, Nirvana, Paradise or inner peace is that they don’t have just that. I know I wanted this. And I know that as I got more and more inner peace and harmony, I started to wish for more adventure.
Like the athlete who works so hard to win a race. Sweat pouring, muscles aching. She so want to get to the finish line, and most of all get that gold medal and reap the award for those thousands of hours of training. And then she does. Excitement and glory and that total satisfaction turns into a harmony and bliss that is hard to fathom. But not for long. Staying in the bliss gets boring. Working toward it is the real deal. That is the drive, the purpose.
There is no day without the night, no pleasure without pain and no high without the low. A valley is marked by surrounding mountains. And winning is appreciated when it occurs occasionally.
I strongly suspect L. Ron Hubbard was right when he said that the optimum situation and emotional level is at games.
weechat as a communications hub
I have been using irssi as my Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client for more than a decade. It has served me well. But then I was prompted by a couple of weechat users over at the #ranger channel to try weechat.
I love technical improvements, but my setup is becoming increasingly hard to improve upon. Any suggestions that tickle my nerdy fancy is highly welcome. And so I embarked upon setting up weechat on one of my DigitalOcean servers and use ssh to connect to my new chat client. This setup allows me to always remain on the chat channels even when my laptop is hibernated. I simply reconnect via ssh to weechat running in screen on my server. An added benefit is that I can also stay on with my Android phone via the excellent “Weechat Android” app. How cool is that?
The configuration is nicely interactive and with a set of useful scripts, I have a powerful setup:
- iset.pl – Set WeeChat and plugins options interactively (a must-have)
- buffers.pl – Sidebar with list of buffers (another must-have)
- shortenurl.py – Shorten long urls using isgd or tinyurl (important)
- nickregain.pl – Automatically attempts to regain IRC primary nick
- colorize_nicks.py – Weechat nick colors in the chat area and command line
- go.py – Quick jump to buffers
- buffer_autoclose.py – Automatically close inactive private message buffers
- histsearch.py – Quick search in command history
- auto_away.py – A simple auto-away script
And then I got Bitlbee set up on the server. Bitlbee is a chat hub for various protocols that weechat can connect to. Bitlbee can hook onto your Facebook chat and your Twitter feed. I got both Facebook chat and Twitter up and running and now I can tweet directly in weechat and have chats and even group chats with Facebook friends in my weechat – both on my laptop and on my mobile. Weechat has become a nice communications hub:
My weechat screen
Conclusion (so far)
My current conclusion goes like this:
The purpose of life is to enjoy the ride
If you were Geir’s coach, what would you recommend?
I am continually honored to have so many intelligent readers commenting on my blog. I would like to take the opportunity to self-correct based on hopefully valuable recommendations from you.
Is the universe infinite?
I have been returning to this question lately – and I see three possible answers:
- The universe is finite
- The universe is infinite
- The universe is “infinitely finite”
Option 1 introduces an “edge problem” where the particles at the end of the universe will have interacting forces on only one side. If this option is true, the universe started out as point-like Big Bang, satisfying the requirements for a Black Hole.
If Option 2 is true, the universe has always been infinite since nothing can go from finite to infinite (or vice versa). It started out as infinitely large and very dense at the Big Bang, satisfying the requirements for a Black Hole at all areas of space.
Option 3 would be similar to moving on Earth’s surface – if you move straight in one direction, you eventually circle the Earth and end up where you started. The universe could be a 3 dimensional space residing in a higher dimensional space – if you travel in one direction, you would never reach an edge. Instead you can end up back where you started (given that the higher dimensional space is a uniform “sphere”). The universe could have started out as a small 4D+ space.
I can’t for the moment see other options. Please pitch in with your own views.
One question that often pop up with an infinite universe is this: “If the universe is infinite, would everything that can happen be bound to happen – and an infinitely amount of times?”. The usual answer when you Google this is “Yes.” The answer is the same for “If you throw a dice an infinite number of times, must you eventually roll a six? Must you in fact roll an infinite number of sixes?”
While it may be intuitively correct to answer “yes” to these questions, the answer is in fact wrong. Here’s why:
Consider the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, …
There are infinitely many of them … so 2 must show up more than once, right? Manifestly wrong.
But say we are talking about states of matter in a finite region. This would be modeled by using finitely many numbers, 1, 2, 3, say, and making an infinite list.
1, 2, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, …
You say 2 must appear again … but it doesn’t. If you have finitely many states and infinitely many trials, all you can say for sure is that at least one state must reappear infinitely many times. But any particular state, such as the state that defines “you” or a pink elephant or a galaxy; might appear zero, one, 47, or infinitely many times.
It’s amazing how many otherwise smart people are fooled into thinking that “in an infinite universe, everything must happen.” This is manifestly false.
So even in an infinite universe, a chance of something specific happening is undecided. This is related to the equation
which is mathematically undecided.
The question of whether the universe is finite, infinite or something else poses some interesting questions. And perhaps some interesting answers may arise.
Self correction
Self correction is perhaps the greatest of all abilities. The ability to correct one’s own thinking, emotions and actions, to correct one’s own path or one’s own goals to whatever one wishes. This ability relies on not having to defend oneself or any methodology.
To the degree one is defending self, one is glued to one’s own past and self correction suffers. To the degree one is defending a methodology, one is less able to self correct in that area.
An example pops to mind; the Scientology upper levels (the OT levels). As a person progresses up the “Bridge to Total Freedom”, he may get gains. These gains may lead him to defend Scientology. And to that exact degree he will shut himself off from self correction. He may feel “on top of the world”, making him ignore signs of own inabilities, failures, even depression. He feels that “nothing can hurt him”, making him cover up his emotions where he is in fact hurt by another. He may feel obliged to be rational, leading to blind spots of own irrationality.
But Scientology is just a one of a million examples. Every religion and every methodology injects this liability in its adherents. We see this in science where scientists cling to a theory. Energy, effort and IQ is spent defending that theory rather than seeking refinements or even better theories. We see this in marriages where a man is eager to defend his ways rather than improve them. Politicians are perhaps the worst of breed.
Defense weakens the ability to self correct. Loosing one’s need to defend can open up new areas to self correction.
Geir Isene - uncut 