True choices

 Buddhism has a feel like stoicism to me, feel in the jazz sense of the word. This feel comes from an acknowledgement that the only true choices we have is the choice of emotions and reactions. Marcus Aurelius spends a section of his Meditations gripping about going to the senate when he wants to be a philosopher or artist or whatever, but finally concludes that it's in his nature to go the senate, and other beings don't bitch and moan about their nature so why should he. It's a passage that I find myself thinking about a lot because of it's contrast to the idea of "self" in Buddhism. Today, though, I find myself thinking about it as a different perspective on a similar tool. To contrast perspective, in the Dhammapada we are introduced to the idea of self as a mirror and how the true self shines through.

So before we continue, I want you, the captive reader, to listen to me about the self. My American self sits on my ass to watch people more well known and more well off than me talk about humility in interviews with other famous people. In these interviews, it's common for people to wax philosophical about how nobody gets to know the real them, who they feel is the person they keep private for friends and family. In my reading of the Dhammapada, this idea of "the real me" doesn't exist, it's a reflection the people, situations, and expectations that surround us. Yes, you don't act the same with your work friends as you do with your drinking buddies, or as you do with your family. Is your work self your true self, or is the vulnerable version of you at 2 am lying next to your lover your true self? Your true self shines through in moments like these, but you are not hiding a face from the other, your reflecting the mood and the people. My buddies at the warehouse don't need to be impressed with my way of beautiful prose, because I'm not done fucking them and I'm not trying to sleep with all of them. There is a way I want to be seen by others, things I want to be known for. I want to be know as caring, helpful, hardworking, efficient, but not as a push over. Being known as these things is helpful to me throughout all my interactions and gets me the most money/tail/status/power. While I might be more gentle and caring with a lover than with a co-worker, I can choose to bring the better aspects of myself to these interactions, in different ways. To pull away the reflections and illusions in ourselves is to point an analytical eye inwards and acknowledge who we are to those around us. For me to go any deeper than than this would require a discussion on "the axioms of self", what are things that make up personality at a base level. For a TLDR; to know who we are, we must not only acknowledge ourselves, but also our interactions with other people.

In the sense of western philosophy, we love the self, and in the US we have built entire concepts around individualism. It is hard to truly give yourself to another person, but we continue to try, whether it's giving our soul to a partner or our body to Christ. We have built institutions in the USA based on the time honored tradition that god only helps those that helps themselves.We are more aware of the struggles of the individual, and tell stories of individual struggle against the wider world. The story of the businessman that worked his way up from nothing to have an empire. The man with a stable family life despite being from a poor broken home. The story of survival vs a world that only wishes to see us fail. The people who help us are friends, but the rest of the world pushes against us, keeping us from our true calling of success. The self is more isolated, a force against nature, a rock beaten by the waves of time and society. Or maybe this is just how it feels in the real America, a world of quiet nature that separates us from other people and allows us to reflect on this feeling.

Back to my man Marcus. I've focused on this concept of the self as it appears, but there is another interpretation of this. True choice only exists as our choice of emotions. The buddha, the story goes, was born to a life of luxury and status, but found emptiness inside. So he left his wife and child to spend years starving himself, denying himself pleasures of flesh, drinking only when important to live, but still found emptiness inside. There are things that make us animals (the need for sipping, sex, and sleep) there are things that make us human (anger, joy, pleasure and obsession) but these aren't "good" and "evil" things. We let anger consume us and eat us alive. We can do this by focusing on a thought and letting the feeling into our gut to make our stomach turn. Then we take that feeling and bring to all our interactions. "Having trouble at work now because I'm bringing personal baggage at home". Pleasure and the quest for pleasure has consumed many for many reasons, but the enjoyment of pleasure is a hit of dopamine in our physical brains, and exists in creatures that have access to dopamine. We can choose to acknowledge these, and not fight the feelings but instead try to acknowledge where they come from, and acknowledge the joy and hardship that these things bring us.. Mindfulness. It's mindfulness you guys. I'm only talking about mindfulness.

Marcus is really classical in how he writes, in that he speaks about cultural knowledge as if it's world truths. He turns his eye inwards through his cultural lens (and his class appropriation of a slaves philosophy). His meditations are something wonderful because he is using a tool of analytics , not his musings of how hard work and good teachers gave him the status he enjoyed. This analytics exists in the writings of western philosophers, but is not explored on the same level of buddhism. Rene Descartes exists because he thinks, but only takes small steps away from the culture, the situations, and things in the material world that influenced his thoughts.

Is Buddhism better than stocism? Buddhists and stoics are people, and their ideas areas wonderfully flawed as people. Both give their ideas wrapped in the cultural trappings (the sexism, classism, prejudice, and fear of change) of their environment, but both give us this tool of mindfulness though, a tool of self analysis that works to get past the masks, reflections and illusions created by this bullshit to see ourselves. A tool to see ourselves and our connections to others. With this tool, we can begin to see the person we bring to every interaction, and we can choose emphasis or change for these things.

Maybe someday soon, we can have a sit down and talk about Emma Goldman, violence, and the use of power. For now, let's just have a friendly smoke sess and talk about choices.

10 Mathematicians to help make learning FUN!

Hey parents! Are you having a hard time getting your kid interested in mathematics?  Here's a list of interesting Mathematicians to keep your kid saying "Arthritic? More like Awesome-mitic!"

 

1. Karl Marx - Whoa there, coming out the gate a little hot here, aren't we? Well, there's mathematics in everything and boy did he ever find them them in his analysis of the working class struggle, Das Kapital. Of course, some of his calculations were made using geometery, which was slowly falling out of fashion by that point. Make learning fun, exciting and alive while you learn about the class struggle and how war is finically inevitable!
   
2. Sophia Kovalevskya -Did someone say Grrrrrl pwr!? Sophia didn't need no man in order to become the first female professor of mathematics in Euorpe, even if it was Russia. Married on paper to the 26 year old Vladimir Kovalevsky when she was 18, they never fucked until they were in their 30's. This allowed Sophia to leave Russia (at a time when women couldn't get a mathematical education and couldn't travel without a male family member to escort you) to get a mathematical education in another country. It also allowed Vladimir to translate the works of Darwin into Russian before Darwin even finished them!
   
3. Galoe. Gal-law? Gal-o-iss? How do you say Évariste Galois? The dude everyone knows, and the one that reminds the world that we are in fact, crazy rockstars that live fast and die young. An old mathematician produces no work, so this punk went out on top in a gunfight. He was looked down upon, because he was a son of a politician during the french revolutionary war. But Gal-law he was like, no I'm a mathematician, I don't want to politics, I want to math. Like the chivalrous, gentleman he was, he got into a pistol dual over the honor of a maiden which he tragically died from. Not until after he released his brilliant ideas into the world, which old people never got, just Jimi Hendricks "Electric Ladyland". Why hasn't there been a movie made about this gorgeous young white french dude, but instead mathematicians get Russell Crowe just getting older and fatter?
4.  Godel. Simple. This one ryhmes with Yodel. He was Einstien's pal. Well, actually, Einstien looked up to him, because Einstien only proved relativity, but Godel proved that 1 + 1 = 2.
5. Stephen Smale - Good, finally an American in here. Stood on the steps of the Kremilin in the 60's and told both the Americans and Ruskies to fuck off!! USA! USA! USA! Also had a major breakthru in the field of topology which proved that Poincare conjecture is true in dimensions with more than 3 dimensions.  
6. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi - If you remember that he's not a Muslim mathematician, but a PERSIAN mathematician, then you can begin to understand why a man named Muhammad can invent algebra and get the word Algorithm named after him. While little is know about his life, his works have been kept and were the stepping stone from algebraic like thinking during the Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek, and Roman periods to algebra as tool for calculation. Mathematicians don't become legends and gods of the field because people remember the gossip of the day, they live on through the works they create. No one remembers or talks about how Euclid wrote the elements, people barely remember Euler outside of math circles, and Fermat is remember for dying and leaving behind an unsolvable puzzle that has since been solved. Death comes to us all, (Muslim, Christian, Buddhist) and time will make fools of any legacy we leave.
   
7. Leonardo DaVinci - Conspiracy time, kids! Why does this man who hung out with scientists and mathematicians seem to have so much engineering thrown into his work? Who knows! Aliens, a group devoted to the child of Christ, maybe, IDK, fucking lizard people!? The fact that he illustrated a book on a divine proportion and seems really good getting precision and proportion right in his work shows how he was influenced by outside forces.
   
8. Leonardo Fibonacci - It's the number. The important one. God's number. It shows up in everything, from plants to whole financial systems. It's phi, and even Euclid knew about, so it must be important. And Fibonacci mentions the series of numbers as a fun problem about rabbits to teach people how to use the new fangled "Arabic Numbers". That's what he wants you to think though! He was one in the line of people that keeps the secrets of the mathematics that holds together time and space, started by Pythagoras himself it has been passed on. Fibonacci was a failure and released that number as an innocent problem about rabbits. The rest has been kept secret.
   
9. Lewis Carole - Yes, he was a mathematician. And a weirdo. Maybe a pedophile? Someone thought he was Jack the Ripper, too. Oh! And he wrote a famous drug trip that became a Disney film! The man famous for disappearing cats and world's that make no sense, actually was really obsessed about logic. Did a book on linear logic. Also did some  mathematical work involving fair voting systems. But he also maybe hated "new" abstract mathematics, wanting to keep "real" numbers and geometry.
   
10. Gregori Peleman - The youngest on our list, he proved the poincare conjecture in 3 diminsions. He also just wants to be left alone, and  lives with his mother in St. Petersburg Russia where he publishes no math.
    

Determinstic free will, now on the right blog

  Deterministic free will is the idea that we have choices, but the choices are limited. These choices can come from genetics, socioeconomically standing or race. They can be a end point of a Markov nightmare chain, where every decision is runway train of wrong. We can look at our choices like a decision tree, where each answer brings us a grouping of choices. It's an infinite tree with infinite choices, but each local grouping of choices is finite.

 

 A person can be represented as a vector with a magnitude of time. We start with V₀ equaling Birth and V_n+1 equaling death, with n being the number of events, or "choices" in a person's life. A person becomes a set of events like marriage, celebrations, traffic accidents, and first attempts at kinky sex stuff.

As we approach V_n+1 and look backwards, each choice flows into the other in a deterministic way. Things just lined up and happened to fit that things just seemed meant to be. But we are aware that if we weren't at the bus station that day the cute little sex addict showed up, we might have never had the chance at a handy on the Philly to Boston line. Do we have full free will, and each vector is a beautiful, unique combinations of our choices that disappear when we die, or do we live in fear of what a great decider chose for us, a life determined by genetics, bad spawn points, and the all powerful effects of astrology?

A choice in hindsight can appear deterministic due to it's recursive nature. V₁ affects the chances of what V₂ could be as well as the possibility of it's success. Someone who decides that their studies aren't important in high school might find the next event in life and it's choice limiting if they want to go to college. It doesn't limit the chance of making a six figure salary, but it sure as hell doesn't make it easier. While the choice "Sell all of my possessions and live in the woods" always exists, if the chooser has never taken a wild risk and feels uncomfortable for long periods in the woods, it has a low chance of being chosen. They are more likely to be using their skill set of "15 years of hiding my stress in a deep place" and continuing to die inside until they are an empty husk going through the motions until death.

It is a logistical nightmare to sit here and try to run analysis on each possibility that exists in the midgame of life. Like in chess, the number reaches high enough that it might as well be considered infinite. So, let's continue this idea and look at the question of free will through chess.

A letter to the past

Dear 18 year old Sam,

This is a letter I've thought about writing for a while, and now I'm awake with at 1:30 am in a foreign country with some insomnia. It's as good as a time as any.

What have I been up to since I saw you last? It's been a while, so there's a lot to say. Of course, you'll do it all of it as well, but it will be nice to give you a highlight real. Let you know what you have to look forward to, because if I remember correctly you're going through some rough times.

Do you even think you're going through a rough patch? From some of your journal entries you wrote, it seems that you are having a tough time dealing with Steph. And more importantly to me, you're about 5 years away from being diagnosed with adult ADHD. As it turns out, these things are connected. In the next couple of years you might see that you're not the only person your age that is dealing with the end of relationship badly, but from what I remember, your case comes from a combination of not knowing what that relationship was and having a huge obsession with her. The latter is due to ADHD, apparently. It will make sense in 5 years, but for now all I can say is that you have trouble with hyperfocus, something where you can focus too much on something and it causes you to lose focus on some finer details. It's really hard for me to explain in a few short sentences, and you'll have a therapist that can do it so much better in 5 years. It's something to look forward to.

On the one hand, I'm excited for you. In the next 5 years you'll gain most of you're wildest stories. You'll go to college for a year and half, you'll live in a tent for 3 months, and during these points you will see and do some crazy and wild things. Now, some of it comes from a place of being young and wild, some of it comes from not knowing better, but most of it will come from drugs. I'm writing to you and not my 20 year old self because you're still at a transitional place where you're trying to figure things out, if I'm remembering correctly right now in July you're probably still doing haying. So even in this year, you'll work at the chocolate factory for 2 weeks before getting fired, you'll work at the Pepsi plant for a few months before deciding to go to college because you don't like the Pepsi plant, shit will hit the fan with Steph a couple weeks after you turn 19, and then there's a whole crazy experience when you're 19. The 20 year old version of us is kind of a mess, I don't think he'll listen to me because he still thinks that he "just likes having fun" and it's not a problem. He's not happy with himself, between you and me.

In 5 years, you're going to hit a huge new milestone. There's the therapy, like I mentioned before, but what is more important I feel is that for 3 year you were able to come up with a plan, set a goal, and stick with it and it pays off in a huge way. You get to go to New Zealand! That is a two month period jammed with a ton of new, exciting things to do. Hitchhiking, farming, seeing a new culture and at the same time seeing America through new eyes. Again, how does one begin to talk about 2 months worth of experience in just a few words? You'll see it. The bigger take away is a feeling of accomplishment. You've worked hard with a goal in mind for 3 years, the idea that you'll build 3 years of experience and that will give you the experience to go anywhere you want. And it was something you didn't think you would be able to do, because of the small failures and aforementioned drug problem. And this feeling is something you build on. You'll get a small research job for 5 years in the mushroom field and while there begin to try and learn Russian. Which brings me to now. I just skipped over a lot of things, like all the small success you had. You get to be on an album cover for a very small cd release, you get into a music video. At work there's a lot of small things that are great. You get an office, you get your name on a small research piece, you help build and design a brochure, you do get to help with some breeding and you pay off all your debt which gives you more freedom to do things. There's failure in that time too, like you get into an accident and lose your car which forces you to take on a lot of debt and struggle. You'll live in a low cost apartment in a rough neighborhood and deal with a rotating cast of roommates, some of who are cool but others that are batshit insane. It's the nature of the place.There's a lot of frustration in trying to get out and meet and date women, but really everyone finds it hard. In your case, it's money, the place you're living and still learning all of it. I think it evens itself out, the success and failure, or at least you finally gain the maturity to see it that way.

I can sit here and talk about all the lessons learned like maturity, or responsibility, or what not, but a small truth is that I write this in an apartment in Moscow after 5 weeks of studying and to a degree partying. It's a part of being able to be free of responsibility for the first time in 5 years. I wouldn't out it in the same category as what we go through in our college years. There was a darker undertone to that that comes out more fully 21 to 23, where this is more of a celebration. For example, for the first time in 29 years, I haven't chewed on my fingers for 2 months. I've never seen my fingers look this smooth! And I'm writing to you because I want to put things in perspective. I want to start thinking about the goals I have over the next few years, how they line up with what I wanted in the past, and what I have to look forward to. I think the thing is, we are both looking forward and wondering what's next, but I get the added benefit of having 11 years of really cool adventures and experiences to look back on. You do have some fun things to think about from your time in school, but you want a life of adventure after the feeling of being in school. It's the reason why you've been planning a cross country trip in your mind for a while now. By the way that trip happens, but it doesn't happen the way you plan. That doesn't mean it's a failure though, but I don't think that's something we realize until much later. It's so easy to go into things with a certain expectation of how it will turn out, but it's what we take away from the whole experience is what ends up being important.

Wow, that's a wall of text. To wrap things up a little: so when you're 22 you come with a 10 plan, and the end of that plan is to start your own business. The mushroom farm ended up being longer than I expected, but now I want to begin to move forward with it. I feel like I have the experience, and being in Moscow gives me some opportunity. Oh boy, and the next 3 years will be a rollercoaster. Here's something funny too. For the last few years, I set goals in my professional life, because it was easy to set and reach. I'm feeling like setting some goals in my love life is something I can actually do now. I remember you spent the last few years setting goals like "By next year I'll get girlfriend" or "I'm going to lose my virginity!" You, my friend, strike me as being a little unsure of yourself. So it goes. Everybody around is unsure of themselves, and it only gets slightly better in 11 years, honestly. Hot damn though, I need to come with those actual goals though. Next time I write, I'll send them your way.

Friday post on failure

Life is for the living. It's cliché to say, but it still has some truth after all these years. After years of being told this by some party animal after 10 vodka shots, sometimes this and other sayings like it echo in my head but its lost it meaning. Right now to me it means to go out and fail.

The hardest part of getting out and doing anything is the failure part. It feels so hard because there's always this idea that I've blown my chance, and it won't come around again. But then I wake up again the next morning.

Failure is not a force that stop me, because failure does not stop the world from moving. As long as the sun rises, I will wake up and move on. There's enough in my way to stop me from failure, from lack of focus to procastination to a simple chaotic world that doesn't care. If anything, failure is a time to stop and reflect.

The hardest part of failure is not having the answer to why it happened, and that answer isn't always there. Many times though it's not an obvious answer, at least not to me. From simply saying the wrong thing in a job interview, not knowing proper etiquette during a date, and sometimes just having a bad day. Or maybe I made a promise to post everyday, then fell behind.

And depression just sucks the big one, doesn't it? It just becomes so easy to get sucked in and dragged down. Obsessing over the details, letting the anxiety take hold.

I'm writing about this because I need the pick-me up. So often, I'll look at a task and think "Oh, this will be simple." And it never has been simple. Ever. If I wanted to lay back and just let life pass, then it would be simple. I guess in that instead, I would the type of person who blamed every problem on outside forces, feeling completely without control of my own life. Seeing how I make my own luck, I guess that's not the life for me.

I am hard pressed to think of getting second chances. There has been at least one, funny enough. I remember taking an AP writing class years ago in high school. I needed the English, but had no desire to take an AP class. It was the only available, and I had the grades and GPA to do it. We were supposed to write 3 papers before the class start. Me being the procrastinator I am, I never wrote the first paper. So I bullshitted it, wrote the other papers on time, and told the teacher that since I was a late comer to the class, I didn't have the time to write the first one. It worked, and I got a second chance to write the paper. Fuck me running, there is something to say for tenacity, right?

Ha, I just realized the last job I had was a second chance. This one was coming home after the first farm job I had completely imploded. I was looking for jobs, and I actually put an application in at Lambert Spawn. But I was deemed untrustworthy and unexperienced. 3 years later, I was passing through without a job again and was able to land the job for 5 years.


In the first instance, I had enough of a smooth tounge to talk my way into it, I guess. I probably had some decent written papers and the teacher had a soft spot. In the second instance, I had to go away, get more experience, and come back to prove myself. So try, try, try try again.

Small post

Finding the perfect work/life balance is the American dream, and even more of a dream if someone comes to you and diagnoses you with ADHD. I'm still getting used to it, and that's my excuse for why getting back to blogging everyday is taking some time getting used to. But here's the thing I'm finding here in Moscow: I'm not having a hard time finding the balance, just getting used to it is what is taking me some time.

Over the past 5 years, I have been able to develop the habits to be organized. This organization came from work: Today I do this, tomorrow, that, and the next day. Today I'll break my work into these categories, this paper work goes in this folder, and so on. Being able to have a life beyond work was a struggle, and I'm honestly thinking that work was stressful because there was no life outside of work on a regular basis. Nothing beyond watching TV, at least. Going back further to school, my brain let do school or have a social life, but not both.

Of course, having a work/life balance tips the other way when you don't have a job. There are still things that I can do to be productive though. Writing, programming, job hunting, and studying are all things that I can now find time to beyond just going out every night and drinking. At first, I could feel the divide still exist - My first full week, I focused on going out and seeing the city and getting dates. The productive parts feel to the side. My second full week, I was productive, but getting out stopped becoming a regular thing. I'm writing this now, because in my third full week I can say that I've been productive AND still have been able to get out. And it makes my brain feel elevated to know that.

I don't have to be out feeling guilty that I didn't get all my responsibilities done for the day, and I don't feel cooped up and crazy after spending several hours inside working on various projects. I can bask in this peaceful feeling of knowing that things are done, and are in place. Maybe my brain is a OCD brain trapped in an ADHD body, it starts to stress when things aren't in the proper place but nothing can ever be in it's proper place because ADHD doesn't let it. Maybe disorder is chaos and chaos is the cause of insanity. Maybe old granny was right and cleanliness is next to godliness. Maybe I'll never try to approach in a scientific fashion and won't try to figure out if organization makes others feel at peace.

Excitement over a peaceful feeling is a good excitement to have.

Excitement over learning Russian

I have class today, so getting excited about studying a foreign language is the best idea in order to get me ready for the coming week.

When I was traveling around New Zealand and talking to many people from different countries and reading every book I could get my hands on, I started to realize that while the world speaks English at this point, only speaking English cuts me off from a huge source of information. As I started to get further in the science world, I started to see that while scientists publish the work they want to share in English, that doesn't stop them from publishing their work in their own language. That was my reasoning for attempting to understanding a new language, in order to read more books.

Now it's 5 years later, and the desire to push myself to new limits has kicked in. After trying to study Russian on my own for 5 years, I find myself in Russia studying the language. My first draft of this was digging online for resources to better master a language, comment on techniques and to come up with new strategies to master Russian. But that's not why I'm excited about learning a language. I'm pushing myself to those limits because I'm excited.

As an American, Russian and Soviet history seemed so new, foreign, and slightly edgy to a degree. I had friends studying it, but it's an interest that confused people older than me, and that's what's really important. Someday, I will be one of the oldest people, and who will I have to piss off and confuse then? As I dug deeper into the language, then I started finding it was hard to find Soviet books translated into English. I get that Russia is proud of Lolita, but not every book we read needs to be an intense artistic work. Sometimes I want to read a James Bond novel that just reads like some middle-age man trying to work out his mid-life crisis. A forty year old spy is a respected, dangerous cool guy who bangs 20 year olds in exotic locations. Just pure excitement and coolness.

Anyways, this is a reminder to myself why I'm here. Read books, and chase after exotic women. After all, isn't that what life is all about? Books and tail?