smart is the new sexy

“Crow Seidr” Trollwood Art, Nov 2016

You may have figured out that I am a huge fan of history. That obsession with learning stories of our past has been with me my entire life. In the past fifteen years much of that research has been pre-history.

Let me throw at you an impressive set of numbers. By conservative estimates, Homo sapiens have been around for about 315,000 years. The Home genus has been on this planet at least .5 million years, and some say up to 2.5 million years. Some of the oldest indication of any type of spiritual practice is 300,000 years old, being grave goods buried with a Neanderthal. So our species started all this before we even evolved into our current iteration and the first known practice was some form of belief that life continues after death. By comparison, the first civilization started 5,000 years ago. That’s 310,000 years of human existing on this planet before cities. As the Oracle at Delphi says, “Know Thyself,” and to really know who we are as a species we need to have some understanding of how we lived for the majority of our time here. Evidence shows that we believed in some kind of life after death, and we were animists. We believed in and had dealings with spirits.

People debate endlessly whether or not our species took a “wrong turn.” Whether agriculture, or domestication, or if you believe Socrates, even writing itself were bad ideas. I have my own opinions. But outside of that we still must accept that knowledge does indeed get lost. While most scholars don’t even like the term Dark Ages anymore, all will admit that some knowledge was lost in the West. We lost the recipe for Roman concrete. We lost the recipe for Greek Fire. Judging by how people seem to feel strongly about spiritual practice, you can bet that much of what was discovered on that topic has been destroyed. Think about what must have been lost in those 300,000 years? The voices of those elders lost to time. I truly hope that Babbage was right and with enough computing power we can go back reconstruct every vibration that ever occurred in our atmosphere.

Another point, why do we even care? Certainly our species has made great advances in the creation and retention of knowledge. Haven’t we gone well past what our ancestors knew? Maybe, maybe not. One thing that I think can be said is that the focus of that knowledge, and the uses for the intellectual capacity of our civilization, has changed. Spiritual matters take a back-seat to science and economics. Not that those are bad things. But what does that say about magick? Has the art of magick advanced?

Yes, yes it has. Albeit at a much slower rate and with much fewer resources. Many ancient cultures believed magick to be the highest form of learning. All of the intellectual, economic, political, and temporal capacity went towards the study of magick in a big way. Why am I obsessed with the Ancient Egyptians? One need only look at the Pyramids and know that their culture spent a lot of its time thinking about magick. The huge portion of the cultural records that survive focus on preparing for one’s death.

The point of all this, besides raising some even more interesting questions, is how it effects our relationship with the spirits. One question you have to answer for yourself is, are spirits immortal? Many of them claim to be, and I have no reason not to take them at their word. One can research the names of many spirits through the gimoires and all the way back to ancient cultures. Are these the same spirits? Maybe, but at the very least the spirits seem to have knowledge of those ancient names. So even if the spirits are not immortal they certainly know their history and the history of their interaction with us.

What did that interaction look like for the vast majority of our time on this planet? It seems to have involved a lot of drugs and journeying through trance states. It certainly didn’t involve brass seals and contracts written on virgin paper, because we didn’t have any of those things through the majority of our history. Although maybe those methods are a refinement of the communication process, a sort of updated technology. But this does prove that those methods are not absolutely necessary. That the spirits can be contacted by other means. So while grimoire purists may be advancing the art, it may not be the only way or even the best way to contact those spirits.

Physical Properties of Gallium: The Wonder Metal

Gallium does not crystallize in any of the simple crystal structures. The stable phase under normal conditions isorthorhombic with 8 atoms in the conventional unit cell. Within a unit cell, each atom has only one nearest neighbor (at a distance of 244 pm). The remaining six unit cell neighbors are spaced 27, 30 and 39 pm farther away, and they are grouped in pairs with the same distance. Many stable and metastable phases are found as function of temperature and pressure.

The bonding between the two nearest neighbors is covalent, hence Ga2 dimers are seen as the fundamental building blocks of the crystal. This explains the drop of the melting point compared to its neighbor elements aluminium and indium.

The physical properties of gallium are highly anisotropic, i.e. have different values along the three major crystallographical axes a, b, and c (see table); for this reason, there is a significant difference between the linear (α) and volume thermal expansion coefficients. The properties of gallium are also strongly temperature-dependent, especially near the melting point. For example, the thermal expansion coefficient increases by several hundred percent upon melting. 

A compilation of chrome extensions and iOS + Android apps (some are paid and some are free)  °☆.。.:*・°☆

| For your computer |

fliqlo

momentum

lanes

clarity

embark

minimal clock

infinity

currently

polar clock

caffeine

f.lux

be limitless

leoh

dream afar

| For your note taking |

evernote

onenote

simplenote

somnote

iNotes

notability

notes plus

google keep

quip

inkflow visual notebook

jot

good notes

noteshelf

| For your to-do lists | 

wunderlist 

moo.do

todoist

habitica

trello

any.do 

priority matrix

do

glass planner

swipes

timetune

| For your planners + calendars |

myStudyLife

myHomework

sunrise calendar

google calendar

plan

sol calendar

| For your timing + focus | 

tide

forest

pomotodo

flat tomato

pomello

pomodrone

clearfocus 

tomato timer 

30/30

focusnow

tasks and measures

self control

stayfocusd

timewarp

cold turkey

atimelogger

writer’s block

| For your presentations |

prezi

powerpoint

emaze

raw shorts

powtoon

| For your storage | 

google drive

dropbox

| For your mindmaps + diagrams | 

mindmeister

lucidchart

goconqr

gliffy

google drawings

| For your tests + flashcards | 

goconqr

quizlet

flashcards+

anki

| For your writings | 

zotero

grammarly

hemingway

| For your health |

fabulous

plant nanny

safetrek

sleep bot

sleep better

to bed

nike + running

waterlogged

period tracker

weight loss coach

health mapper

medisafe

| For your inner peace  | 

stop, breathe & think

headspace

pacifica

noisli

sleepio

infinite storm

relax melodies

calm

sam

thunderspace

mindshift

taomix

i am

pillow

rainbow mountains (peru)

red soil (canada/PEI)

rings (saturn’s if they were on earth) 

bioluminescent waves

northern lights (canada)

salt flats (bolivia, where they filmed crait but did NOTHING COOL WITH IT except red dust?? like??? come ON)

and cool fauna like the touch me not or like, you know, the venus flytrap.. and don’t get me started on BUGS like… we have bugs cooler than sw aliens

Tsingy di Bemaraha, Madagascar

Zhangye Danxia, China (similar to the Rainbow Mountains in terms of appearance)

Chocolate Hills, Philippines

Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland

Quebrada de Humahuaca, Argentina

Lake Retba, Senegal

Tepui, Venezuela

Tsingy du Bemaraha, Madagascar again (but a different part)

(those are razor-sharp, if you were wondering. very little of this area has been explored because YIKES)

Lake Natron, Tanzania

(looks cool, but is alkaline enough to Kill Your Shit)

Lake Baikal, Russia

(the deepest lake in the world, seriously)

and I’ll wrap it up with Son Doong Cave, Vietnam, the largest cave in the entire world.

it puts anything Dagobah has to offer to absolute shame:

(seriously, the largest chamber is 660 feet high. you could jam a fucking skyscraper in there and still lose it) 

harry potter movies [4/8] ↳ Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

i know, i know, i’m a little bit early. it’s all good, i have anxiety, i plan ahead constantly. i figured i’d share some of my plans to prepare myself for heading back to school.

1. fix your sleep schedule

for school i wake up at 6:30, in the summer i wake up at 12. and recently i decided to fuck that up even more by pulling an all-nighter and just, in general, screwing up my sleep schedule. i’ll need about a month to fix all this damage, but in general, you should start reacquainting yourself with your school schedule about two weeks before you have to head back.

2. figure out your note keeping system

i’m switching things up this year, and i won’t be using the binder system i’ve had all throughout high school. it’s simply to heavy for my walk to and from school. instead, i’ll be using a filing folder, and keeping loose leaf paper, as well as the week’s lessons in there, and once the week is over, i’ll transfer my notes to the binder system at home, which should limit the weight i carry. also, this’ll force me to have better organization, and hopefully make weekly review easier. just as a rule of thumb, refreshing your note keeping system is something you should do annually, at the start of a new year or even before a new semester; you know what’s been working and what hasn’t been.

3. gather breakfast ideas

i have about ten minutes scheduled in my morning routine during the school year for breakfast. and about five of those minutes are spent figuring out what to eat. i want to gather simple breakfast ideas that i can test out now, so i don’t waste time deciding what to eat. this just, in general, makes mornings less of a hassle and can help make sure you’re getting a good start to the day.

4. take stock of your supplies

i need a lunchbag and highlighters, my previous ones are no longer able to function, so i need to replace them. i don’t, however, need new pencils, i have plenty. doing an inventory check can really help prevent buying duplicates of something you thought you didn’t have.

5. create achievable goals

this year is my final year of high school, and then i’m off to university, most of my goals centre around applications and just graduating. but there are other things i know i need to do. embracing study habits for one. i’m hoping to do so by staying in the library after school instead of walking home right away because i know i can’t get work done as effectively at home. i’ll also be doing a review for exams all throughout the year, instead of the day before, by creating flashcards and mindmaps for each days lesson. set a general goal, then add the steps you’ll need to take to achieve it.

6. check your courses

i’m dropping out of physics because i don’t need to be taking it and it will give me a spare instead of a full course load. i need to talk to my guidance counsellor before school starts because of it. as well, i like to make sure i’m in the correct classes and that my schedule is as balanced as possible. some schools may not allow this for regular students, mine does. make sure you’re taking what you need to take and what will allow you to succeed.

7. put dates in your planner

my school offers a tentative list of events going on through the year, with set exam and break times. i like to keep track of these, and setting them in my planner makes it easier to see how my year will play out. if your school doesn’t offer this, check out past years scheduling so that you have a general feel for how your year will go.

Stephen Wolfram:

I always found it incredible. [Feynman] would start with some problem, and fill up pages with calculations. And at the end of it, he would actually get the right answer!

But he usually wasn’t satisfied with that. Once he’d got the answer, he’d go back and try to figure out why it was obvious.

And often he’d come up with one of those classic Feynman straightforward-sounding explanations. And he’d never tell people about all the calculations behind it. Sometimes it was kind of a game for him: having people be flabbergasted by his seemingly instant physical intuition. Not knowing that really it was based on some long, hard calculation he’d done.

ET Jaynes:

Feller’s perception was so keen that in virtually every problem he was able to see a clever trick; and then gave only the clever trick. So his readers get the impression that

(1) probability theory has no systematic methods; it is a collection of isolated, unrelated clever tricks, each of which works on one problem but not on th enext one; (2) Feller was possessed of superhuman cleverness; (3) only a person with such cleverness can hope to find new useful results in probability theory.

Indeed, clever tricks do have an aesthetic quality that we all appreciate at once. But we doubt whether Feller, or anyone else, was able to see those tricks on first looking at the problem.

Allen Knutson:

More specifically, one thing I learned from Terry [Tao] that I was not taught in school is the importance of bad proofs. I would say “I think this is true”, work on it, see that there was no nice proof, and give up. Terry would say “Here’s a criterion that eliminates most of the problem. Then in what’s left, here’s a worse one that handles most of the detritus. One or two more epicycles. At that point it comes down to fourteen cases, and I checked them.” Yuck. But we would know it was true, and we would move on. (Usually these would get cleaned up a fair bit before publication.)

and then this last one is about songwriting.

Jeff Mangum:

When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

I don’t have as good a link for that OP has for the others, sadly :(

——

When I first saw this post (probably about two years ago) I saved it in my drafts because the OP’s point is one that intellectually I have always known, but have had a very hard time putting it into practice. 

But as I was cleaning up my drafts folder recently I rediscovered this post, and realized that I had slightly different connections with all of them. So that is what the rest of the post is about.

Wolfram on Feynman:

I’ve mentioned in various places on this blog (these are the only ones I can find at a moment’s notice) that my favorite professor in undergrad was Winston Ou, whose otherwise excellent website does not have two one of the quotes which I remember most fondly. One I’ve already mentioned before*, “To learn, you must be shameless.” The other is relevant to this Wolfram quote: when his advisor was talking to him about how to learn from reading, he stressed that it is not enough to understand the argument. You must reread and reformulate and reinterpret, until you can answer the question: “Why is this completely obvious?”

In the five years since I first heard this story, I have learned that understanding why something is completely obvious is, in fact, very hard work. It’s not work that I have usually wanted to put in. But I do notice that where I have put in this work, I have progressed much further in my understanding. 

(I might also remark that this aesthetic of Feynman’s is very sympathetic with, but not subsumed by, the Grothendieck approach to mathematics.)

Jaynes on Feller:

I think you would be hard pressed to find a single professional combinatorialist who, upon reading this quote, does not immediately think of Tim Gowers’s The Two Cultures of Mathematics. And while there is no stand-out passage from Gowers that this hypothetical person is likely to remember, here is one that perhaps illustrates the connection best:

Combinatorics appears to many to consist of a large number of isolated problems and results […]. Each result individually may well require enormous ingenuity, but ingenious people exist […] and future generations of combinatorialists will not have the time or inclination to read and admire more than a tiny fraction of their output.

For the unaware, Gowers’ piece was specifically written to refute this argument, and others like it, and is probably the most famous of the many essays on combinatorics as respectable mathematics. One of the things that he suggests, is that there are unifying principles in combinatorics— albeit ones which are more obscured and less amenable to formalization than “many” might be used to. These formal difficulties also lead to communication issues between combinatorics and the rest of the community, with remarkable parallels to those that Jaynes finds in Feller.

Knutson on Tao:

I have very little to say about this quote, except that I love it, and I have it stitched on my heart, and there have been times when I remembered this quote specifically which encouraged me to push through with some less-than-pleasant computations.

Magnum on Magnum:

A podcast called Webcomics Weekly explains the prevalence of bad webcomics (which I think applies equally well for bad fanfiction and bad blogs) as a matter of visibility. It is true even for most professional cartoonists, that the amount of shit they have produced surely outweighs the number of quality cartoons they produced by several pounds, optimistically. So the content itself has not changed, but the public’s access has: the (huge quantity of) sludge which used to be hidden, is now prominently displayed on the internet.

My blog is certainly a product of a similar phenomenon happening with mathematical exposition. Before blogs became such a mainstream thing**, where would a no-name grad student like me go to publish long, rambling thoughts on math?

Now, for however bad you think I am at being interesting or coherent, you should check out the first hundred posts on OTAM… I am certainly much better at it than I once was. This improvement was made possible by practice. Without OTAM, it probably would never have happened. I probably would never had reason to step foot in the writing center, and I probably would be a much worse mathematical expositor than I am today. Hence I would be subjecting colleagues to worse talks, and to worse papers.

——

[ * I mentioned it before, and I mentioned it incorrectly: the actual quote is “The key to learning is shamelessness.”, and it is not original to Ou: it is by “C. P. Chou”, according to his admonitions page. ]

[ ** I’m acutely aware that since I am on tumblr, I am writing as a blogger to bloggers— and so we are more likely to inflate the significance or prominence of blogging, which makes any statement like this one suspect. But in the broad sense, a facebook page is essentially a blog, and that alone is just about enough to put blogging comfortably in the mainstream. ]

He knows how it feels to see their faces pinch outside the window before they hurry to the next room.

Shane grew up in a 100 point nursery. They had torn, ratty, books and no teachers, and when snack time came, the tray was pushed through a slat in the door. They were called “unruly” and “damaged” and “stupid.” A lot of the other kids threw tantrums and broke furniture (and sometimes other kids). A lot of the other kids went quiet after the first few years when they realized they’d never be adopted until they were old enough (or pretty enough) to be useful. A lot of the kids cried and didn’t stop until they got taken away or were aged out.

Shane’s grown up a lot since aging out. He put himself through school, got himself a job, shed his 100 points like the torn clothes he’d left the facility in. He’s powerful now, successful, and he’s grown out of the twisted nose, big ears, and gap-toothed smile that had made him one of the less attractive 100 point babies. Or maybe he’s grown into them. Who’s to say?

It’s taken him a long time to get enough Parent Points to do what he wants. Being a man is, for once, somewhat hindering as most of society equates “parental” with “maternal.” He’s lost count of how many social workers have politely hid expressions of surprise when he told them he wanted to adopt stag, that he’s willing to take the classes, get the grades, make the oaths to get even one Parent Point.