I've found that I can have a lot of patience and interest in mental work while stoned, but I forget a lot of it after it's done. Weed is a mild amnesiac, and for someone with otherwise very good memory, this is noticeable. This may be great if you're doing something soul-crushingly boring, but a better strategy is to avoid that sort of work to begin with.
IANAN, but I suspect that in your case, weed is helping because of its indirect action on the opioid system, and despite, rather than because of, the characteristically "weedy" effects. Have you self-medicated with any other euphoriants?
It's boring and easy, but it's necessary if one wants to get rid of it. I don't feel like fighting the good fight myself (or even watching it happen), but I'm glad somebody out there is. Really, it's the same situation as with religion.
Exactly! While pointing out that the emperor has no clothes may be a trivially simple exercise, so long as people are willing to support the emperor, we need to keep shouting about his choice of apparel. All the more when (at least in the US) our tax dollars are going to fund his "clothes."
I assume it's a reference to profs at public universities--- though most of the profs being attacked in the linked article are at French public universities.
In the U.S. I think humanities profs are actually often net money-earners for their schools rather than net spenders of taxpayer money, though. Humanities students cost much less each to educate than science/engineering students (no labs, no real equipment, no computers, lower faculty salaries), yet pay the same tuition, which often produces a surplus: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Humanities-Really-Do/64740/
In the U.S. I think humanities profs are actually often net money-earners for their schools rather than net spenders of taxpayer money, though.
Earning money for the school and being a net tax dollar sink are not mutually exclusive. Some of the money being earned for the school may be federal student aid.
Regardless of the return on the investment in Post-Modernist Humanities Professors, I still object to the fact that my tax dollars are funding them. I mean, if I can invest in good humanities profs that have roughly the same ROI, at least my tax dollars are going to educate someone rather than fill heads with unintelligible fluff.
At publicly-funded universities in the US, tuition dollars are supplemented by tax dollars (plus endowments, grants, etc) to pay the total cost of education. This includes professor salaries. This is, of course in addition to Federal Student Aid (and loans) which are also backed by taxes.
I would actually advise against the MIT lectures. The authors are much better recorded than live, as it were, and the only videos I could find are of very bad visual quality. The book is written so clearly that it requires no further explanation. But, hey, try them--maybe you'll like them.
Don't skip exercises. All the meat is in the exercises. I think there's a bunch at the end of Chapter 2 that make you write a lot of verbose code, to teach you stuff that you probably already understand if you've done OOP. The ideas explained in that section have since got more than their fair share of popularity in the mainstream. Anyway--I skipped those. But many others I thought I'd skip, only to come back to them later and wish I'd done them the first time.
I'm going to disagree, despite being one that typically doesn't learn well via video (ie peepcode, etc) I feel that I took quite a bit away from watching the original SICP lectures. To each their own, I supposed, but I'd highly recommend at least giving the first one or two a chance.
Saying that meditating is "you just sit" is like saying that exercise is "you just move". You'll get somewhere doing only that, but not very far. Things in life that are simple, we already all do--like wiping our asses. On the other hand, meditation ends up working for some people and not others, and different people require different amounts of time and effort to get anywhere. This indicates that meditation is like any other worthwhile thing in life--not simple.
Oh, sure. I'm just reacting to people who think that "sitting Zen" is going to make magical enlightenment fairies fly out of their asses. The way Zen/Buddhism was typically presented in the US, you'd think it had summoned Magic Fairies, or at least was full of antioxidants or something.
I think it probably works for most people, but the actual effects really aren't that profound, which fucks with peoples' expectations. You aren't going to be able to fly, but you might catch yourself before you get mad and chew out a friend about something you know really doesn't matter. Which superpower would you rather have?
I'd also recommend that people find a sane local group to meditate with, or whatever, but I don't know where everyone on HN lives and can't give useful advice there, so my advice is skewed.
With the school of Zen I am familiar with you pretty much do "just sit". The practice is called Shikantaza, literally "Just sitting" in english. With 10% chanting and bowing afterwards.
AFAIK, Shikantaza is only done after you've had a good amount of experience with other, more structured forms of meditation, like counting breaths or following the breath. At this point, you should already have some idea of where you're going, and "just sitting" will be more than just sitting to you.
I sit at a Dojo regularly and occasionally do introductions. We don't teach counting, but do teach following the breath at the nostrils and settling the mind in the hands, as things to come back to once the mind has wandered. There is some technical stuff about posture to learn but basically you just turn up and sit. If they do it differently somewhere else that's cool too, lineages vary.
Yes. Making the Roadster was, according to the founders, a move to compensate for the "weak" and inferior image electric cars currently have, before they start making them for mass market.
I think just about everything anyone believes is false, or at least arbitrary and unfounded. We lack the frameworks to examine the vast majority of things that determine our decisions, and are thus de facto beliefs.
He's right about the Moon landing being a stunt. But the Mars settlement will also be a stunt. Curing aging--that'd be historic. Creating a drug that will make us all happy and compassionate would be historic. Creating a "first world" country in the middle of an ocean where everyone in the world is welcome, as long as they obey the law and create wealth.
Space travel for our civilization is like a poor person putting gold-planted rims on his shitty car. Evolutionary theory has explanations for this sort of behavior.
> Space travel for our civilization is like a poor person putting gold-planted rims on his shitty car.
Well, that's one (wrong) way of putting it. I suspect you may be trolling, but here's some reasons that we might /want/ to pursue space travel:
1) Right now, all of humanity's eggs live in one basket -- literally. One large asteroid strike, sufficiently virulent pandemic, nuclear war, etc, would wipe out our species. Planting a self-sustaining colony on a non-Earth body fixes that.
2) A self-sustaining orbital technology (necessary for a colony) would allow us to build enough solar power satellites to give everyone on Earth enough clean, cheap energy for the next thousand years.
3) Putting a large chunk of our manufacturing on the Moon or in orbit would allow us to reduce the environmental impact of industry.
By the way..."a drug that would make us all happy and compassionate"? Huxley called it "soma", and I would not want to live in the Brave New World.
Huxley is sci-fi and not reality, and so are your reasons. If you want to avoid a pandemic, invest heavily in biotech. If you want clean energy, invest in nuclear plants and more efficient energy storage and such. If you want to avoid a nuclear war, invest in infrastructure that will allow the world's poor to create wealth and raise their standard of living and not want to kill anybody.
By instead dumping all those billions into space exploration, you are actively raising the chance of something terrible happening here on Earth, this "basket" whose destruction you consider so nonchalantly.
IANAN, but I suspect that in your case, weed is helping because of its indirect action on the opioid system, and despite, rather than because of, the characteristically "weedy" effects. Have you self-medicated with any other euphoriants?