George Hernandez: exploring.

George Hernandez
"playing on a seashore"
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[PHOTO: George Hernandez based in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.]George Hernandez: Exploring

Still the #1 George Hernandez !!

"Both the victor and the vanquished are but drops of dew, but bolts of lightning —thus should we view the world." -Ouchi Yoshitaka (1507/1551).

Feed in RSS 2.0 for the Latest Not-Jot Posts Latest Non-Jot Posts

  1. My Keywords 2010-03-17 TAGS: Archives. Ethics. My Stuff. Philosophy. Ramblings. Self Improvement. Thoughts.
  2. My World View 2010-03-17 TAGS: Archive. My Stuff. Philosophy. Politics. Ramblings. Science. Self Improvement. Thoughts. World.
  3. the triumph of self-worth over net-worth TAGS: Inspiring. Mind. Psychology. Relations. Self Improvement.
  4. Now A No-Evil Zone TAGS: Cyber Life. Philosophy. TECH.
  5. Porn: Good for us? TAGS: Psychology. Saucy. Science. Sex.
  6. Free Energy and the Meaning of Life TAGS: Biology. Chemistry. Evolution. Images. Inspiring. Philosophy.
  7. Most Extreme White Dwarf Binary System Found With Orbit of Just Five Minutes TAGS: Beauty. Cool. Inspiring. Science. Space.

Feed in RSS 2.0 for the Last 5 Jots: Videos: Non-Martial Lastest Jot Posts

DateTextLinkSourceTagsNote
20100316 182114 Z Top 10 Things That Annoy Programmers www.kevinwil … noy-programmers/ Cyber Life, Life, Mind, Programming, TECH So true.
20100313 044939 Z Russian Singer Eduard Khil Remix www.youtube. … 78IlJs5JQ&fmt=18 www.reddit.c … y_has_a_bad_day/ Audio, Chill, Funny, Live Action, Videos Nearly lost my milk and cookies. If you haven't seen the original, then watch it first: Я очень рад, ведь я, наконец, возвращаюсь домой .
20100311 193947 Z Human Urine As A Safe, Inexpensive Fertilizer For Food Crops www.scienced … 071008093608.htm Julia Fauna, Flora, Sustainability Free fertilizer right under our noses!
20100311 034458 Z Hypocrisy Alert: Calif. Politician Roy Ashburn Arrested for Allegedly Driving Drunk; It Gets Worse www.cbsnews. … 6524-504083.html www.reddit.c … e_about_married/ Equality, Journalism, News, Politics, USA This atrocious story has been out for a few days already, but I do like how the writer, Kevin Hayes, presented the story.
20100311 023701 Z Limbaugh: I'll Leave US If Health Care Reform Passes (VIDEO) www.huffingt … if_n_491536.html Health, Politics, Radio, USA What sweet news! If only he would leave sooner. Did he say he'd go to Costa Rica on purpose? Costa Rica has universal health care and no army. Doctors taking federal money?! What a shock! What an outrage! O wait they already do that with Medicare.
20100310 200158 Z The Beast File- Google (HUNGRY BEAST) www.youtube. … ch?v=dv4j4bguYYk Cyber Life, Google, Videos It's not too bad, here in the belly of the beast. This is so well done that you think Google made it themselves!
20100310 195521 Z How to Deal With a Proud Person www.wikihow. … h-a-Proud-Person Relations, Self Improvement Some time that person with hubris is me! (Or you.)
20100310 190540 Z Transform Your Hoodie into a Computer Sleeve www.youtube. … ch?v=sNiP953SCOg lifehacker.c … %28Lifehacker%29 Gadget, Live Action, Make, Videos I up-voted this at YouTube, but it was so good I thought I'd log it here too.
20100310 184840 Z Computers do not make children fat translate.go … =en&hl=&ie=UTF-8 science.slas … t+%28Slashdot%29 Computers, Health, Kids Computers do not make children fat ... at least not in comparison to TV.
2010-03-17t21:15:56 Z | TAGS: Archives, Ethics, My Stuff, Philosophy, Ramblings, Self Improvement, Thoughts
My Keywords 2010-03-17

Here is a copy of the content of "My Keywords" page for my archives:

This page has my personal keywords that condense my personal philosophy, faith, and principles. A keyword refers to a word or phrase of words that are seminal. It is a good exercise to personalize, rephrase, un-cliche, rehash, condense, analyze, synthesize, prioritize, place, categorize, compare, contrast, create, stress test, define, explore, examine, etc. ideas.

Structured by word relationships. Counted but not necessarily ordered.

Single words

  1. Explore.
  2. Integrity.
  3. Urgency.
  4. Consequences.
  5. Respond.
  6. Responsibility.
  7. Play.
  8. Risk.
  9. Challenge.
  10. Neoteny.
  11. Ubuntu.
  12. Satyagraha.

Word pairs

  1. Fixation < Change.
  2. Ugly < Beauty.
  3. Try < Do.
  4. Hard < Easy.
  5. Fear < Courage.
  6. Hate < Love.
  7. Sorrow < Joy.
  8. Despair < Hope.
  9. Waste < Conservation.
  10. Pride < Perspective.
  11. Greed < Generosity.
  12. Sloth < Diligence.
  13. Watching < Doing.
  14. Expenses < Income.
  15. Xenophobia < Philoxenia.
  16. Yard < Metre.
  17. Other Date Formats < ISO 8601.
  18. Analysis + Synthesis.
  19. Respect + Dignity.
  20. Fairness + Freedom.
  21. Problems = Opportunities.
  22. Beauty = Truthful
  23. Less = More.
  24. Empiricism --> Faith.
  25. (Study + Practice) --> Instinct.
  26. Judging < Understanding.
  27. Exhaustion < Fortitude.
  28. Resources < Resourcfulness.
  29. Noise < Signal.
  30. Net-Worth < Self-Worth.

Phrases

  1. Be present.
  2. Adjust and accept the probability curve with its good hill and bad tails.
  3. Do you have X? Or does X have you?
  4. Wyrd = (Past <--> Present <--> Future).
  5. Out your inner world.
  6. There is more to invest & give than money.
  7. Conflict --> Competition --> Cooperation --> Consolidation.
  8. In spite of all the rubbish, make efforts to see the other sides of the elephant.
  9. Create closure even if you can't.
  10. Crime --> Consequences --> Forgiveness.
  11. Hear everyone --even those that cannot speak.
  12. It's a shared space.
  13. Create spaces for possibilities.
  14. Be authentically inspired into powerful actions.
  15. Add value: Do more positive than negative.
  16. A Mandelbrot system of object models.
  17. Naked upon a rock.
  18. It's a constructed reality.
  19. Cycle reasoning: deductive + inductive (pattern, abductive, creative).
  20. 侘寂 = Wabi-sabi = imperfect, impermanent, incomplete.
  21. Shared road.
  22. Negative capability.
  23. Tolerance for all but the intolerant.
  24. Consent, especially in sexual matters.

Compare and contrast:

2010-03-17t21:10:44 Z | TAGS: Archive, My Stuff, Philosophy, Politics, Ramblings, Science, Self Improvement, Thoughts, World
My World View 2010-03-17

My world view is unavoidably intertwined with my personal subjective self; I cannot write my world view in an objective fashion. I can put effort into exploring my world view as if I were not me, just as I might try to explore someone else's world view. However, I cannot eliminate myself while exploring myself. Thus before I continue on with exploring my world view, I will briefly review where I've been and where I am:

In 1968 I was born in the Philippines and came to America when I was 4 years old; My parents had gone ahead and we were separated long enough that I did not recognize them when I arrived. I've been deaf in my left year as far as I or anyone else remembers. I was raised Roman Catholic but although I tried all those years to believe in Catholicism, I don't think I have ever believed in anything mystical. I am an introvert and I abhor parties and social gatherings. It is not that I dislike people or society, but that many things, including myself, seem quite noisy. I have kept a journal since high school; I used to have a great emphasis on exploring myself, but since I realized that it was endless, I stopped worrying about it; I still journal but less intensively. I grew up speaking only English, but since my 20s I have come to appreciate the great cultural and identity loss I have by not being able to speak Filipino. I boxed sporadically as a youth; I did Shotokan Karate daily for 13 years; I've been doing Western Martial Arts weekly since 2003. I've been happily married since 1992; we have 2 girls and 1 boy; Julia and my kids are central in my life. I went to Lane Tech H.S. in Chicago; I got a bachelor's in Chemical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I tried to get into the Environmental Protection Agency, but when that failed I bacame a programmer; I currently program and co-own a small company in the health care industry called ICLOPS; I intend to never retire. I collected comic books into my adulthood; I can draw but I never developed it; I suck at making music but I like to listen; I read a good amount. I was not into politics until the aftermath of the 2001-09-11 attacks at the World Trace Centers; I have become more watchful since. I explore anything, but especially philosophy, technology, and martial arts. I'm not seeking fame or fortune; I'm not expecting to do anything spectacular with my life; I'm not seeking great pleasure, nor am avoiding reasonable pains; I just want to explore, live sincerely, and do/be good.

Now that I've given some background on myself, I can proceed with exploring my world view. Why am I exploring my world view? What is my goal? Given that my time is finite, I want to give myself perspective on where I'm at, what I want to do, how to do it, and so on. I want a world view that is sincere and personal, and yet beautiful, powerful, and reliable. As a programmer, I also have another goal: Since I'm bothering to do this work, I might as well see if I can construct it in such a generic way that it would be useful for other people too. I imagine that the latter goal makes the former goal harder, but I think it helps me in that it makes me a bit more accountable. I think I will have to be careful about parts of my world view that are specific to me as an instance of a person, versus the world view that would be applicable to people in general.

When it comes to exploring and sharing my world view, I immediately run into this problem: I have practically an infinite amount of material to explore, but a finite amount of time in which to explore; So how do I start? Where do I start? The data points, the possibilities, the perspectives, are practically infinite. To avoid never starting at all, it seems to me that the answer is to just start where ever I am. As Newton said, we're just "playing on a seashore". We can add or discard stones and shells as we go along. A child-like attitude is key: A child is bold, sees patterns, imagines possibilities, experiments, collects data. When it comes to the young there is a great emphasis on growth, but we forget that growth also involves a great deal of forgetting, prioritizing, forgiving, and letting go.

Zooming out, one realizes that "no man is an island": People are also fostered by other people. While a newborn fish can go about and fend for itself from birth, a new person must be nurtured: A person is a person through other people. This concept is nicely encapsulated by the African concept of ubuntu. A person lives in the context of his or her society. Zooming out even further, a person is also in the context of an eco system, an environmental system, a solar system, and so on. It is hard for a person to think in a larger scope in space: We can barely get past our solar system, let alone our stellar neighborhood, or galaxy, or galactic neigborhood, or universe.

Zooming back in, there is the cosmological timeline, the Sun's lifetime, geologic time spans, biological time scales, human history, generational history, my life, my week, my present. Zooming in and out through time and space affects one's world view. Whether you believe in an afterlife or not affects one's world view. My personal perspective is to try to take a general perspective that would apply regardless of one's familiarity with science or religion. This world view would have to satisfy the evidence you encounter and your instincts. This world view would have to work with a broad spectrum of people, a bell curve. This world view will have to jive with works of science, literature, art, and culture from different times and places. This world view would have to answer two questions: How do you know? How do you feel?

OK, I just came back from taking a bunch of the key concepts and manipulating them symbolically on a piece of paper until it made more sense. It's sort of like math but with ideas. I will try to write down what I came up with.

There nodes: self, other, others, and clumps of others. There are different relationships between nodes: self-to-self, self-to-other, self-to-others, self-to-clumps, other-to-other, other-to-others, other-to-clumps, others-to-others, others-to-clumps, clumps-to-clumps. There are actually an infinite of number nodes: ideas, dead or past nodes, virtual nodes, etc., and an infinite number of relationships. The concept is that you have nodes and node relationships, which, in my mind, I represent as a bell curve, but for now I'll use the upper case Omega: Ω.

Ω must be parsed or dealt with. I represent this as a method with a parameter. I'll use the lower case alpha: α(Ω). The trick then is to achieve the best parsing. α must be beautiful, powerful, reliable. α must apply to the widest range of Ω. The universe is the "α and the Ω", in that nature parses everything according to math and natural laws. In the human context, the same thing happens but we have our own standards of what is a good parsing, of what satisfies our sense of truth, justice, fairness, equitability, efficacy, efficiency, timeliness, beauty, order, etc.

My α(Ω) model may seem too general, but I want it to be scalable and broadly applicable. Here are a few general points applicable to α(Ω):

The universe is α(Ω). Whatever I think or do, whatever models I come up with, the universe is there doing its thing.

To wrap things up, here is a short list of some devices/ideas to layer upon my α(Ω) model. Apply these as well as whatever works for particular situations.

2010-03-16t19:23:33 Z | TAGS: Inspiring, Mind, Psychology, Relations, Self Improvement
the triumph of self-worth over net-worth
the triumph of self-worth over net-worth [http://www.becomingminimalist.com/2010/03/15/the-triumph-of-self-worth-over-net-worth/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+becomingminimalistcom+%28becomingminimalist.com%29&utm_content=Google+Reader]

I like it: net-worth < self-worth.

2010-03-16t18:44:32 Z | TAGS: Cyber Life, Philosophy, TECH
Now A No-Evil Zone
Now A No-Evil Zone [http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/03/15/Joining-Google]

Tim Bray (formerly of Sun) on competing with Apple:

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.

The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.

Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other.

I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.

The tragedy is that Apple builds some great open platforms; I’ve been a happy buyer of their computing systems for some years now and, despite my current irritation, will probably go on using them.

2010-03-11t03:13:22 Z | TAGS: Psychology, Saucy, Science, Sex
Porn: Good for us?
Porn: Good for us? [http://www.the-scientist.com/2010/3/1/29/1/] [VIA: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/bbkgi/porn_good_for_us_scientific_examination_of_the/]
No correlation has even been found between exposure to porn and calloused attitudes toward women.
What does correlate highly with sex offense is a strict, repressive religious upbringing. Richard Green too has reported that both rapists and child molesters use less pornography than a control group of "normal" males.

Porn has also driven a fair amount of computer development. The reddit thread has some material both goofy and thoughtful.

2010-03-10t19:49:32 Z | TAGS: Biology, Chemistry, Evolution, Images, Inspiring, Philosophy
Free Energy and the Meaning of Life
Free Energy and the Meaning of Life [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/03/10/free-energy-and-the-meaning-of-life/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CosmicVarianceBlog+%28Cosmic+Variance%29]

This one is so obvious that it's spooky. The concept of successful genes maximize replication is familiar; that life succeeds because it maximizes entropy on a much lower level than the visible mess we create. The complex processes of life enable chemical reactions to get past a little hill and into a lower energy state.

The Problem Solved by Life by Eric Smith

"The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide." -Mike Russell

Slide of getting over the hill by Mike Russel
2010-03-10t18:27:54 Z | TAGS: Beauty, Cool, Inspiring, Science, Space
Most Extreme White Dwarf Binary System Found With Orbit of Just Five Minutes
Most Extreme White Dwarf Binary System Found With Orbit of Just Five Minutes [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100309091450.htm] [VIA: Julia]

Power, power, power!

This is an intriguing system in a number of ways: it has an extremely short period; mass flows from one star and crashes down onto the equator of the other in a region comparable in size to the English Midlands where it liberates more than the Sun's entire power in X-rays. It could also be a strong emitter of gravitational waves which may one day be detected from this type of star system.

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