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The 64 Arts
The Kama Sutra, far from being just a sex manual, actually encodes quite a lot of guidance about general social interaction in the Indian caste society. The third chapter of the first volume, entitled "The Acquisition of Knowledge," contains a list (verse 15) of "64 arts" in which a person can be accomplished. So, how accomplished are you? I've ( Read more... ) -
hum de dum
i'm drunk on rum and watching Ali and people play Wii sports ( Read more... ) -
Am I no fun any more?
I've realised it's very possible that, recently, I'm no fun any more. I've been taking myself far too seriously, forsaking my usual easy-going and comfortable nature for an extreme pursuit of 'truth' and 'deep thought.' That might be OK if my truths were actually true and my thoughts were actually deep, but as it stands I fear I've just become ( Read more... ) -
Piracy
The problem of piracy - the illegal-copying kind, not the peglegs-and-eyepatches kind - can be summarised, I think, in the following question. In particular I think it highlights the futility of current approaches:
How do you tell 100,000 people something interesting, and get them to keep it a secret? -
Ignorance is bliss
Brief and interesting conversation with somebody via the medium of comments on a Facebook status update, recently. It started with a Proust quote:
"One recipe of happiness is the belief of no entitlement."
I interpreted this as "believe that you're not entitled to stuff, and then when you get stuff, you'll be even happier about it." Become the ( Read more... ) -
Science is awesome!
I'm finding myself increasingly surprised to discover things we've achieved scientifically that I hadn't realised we could do yet. I knew about the problems, I didn't know we'd already solved them.
Sites like Mr Gene offer manufacture of DNA to spec, over the internet.
Fab Labs are low-cost ($20K) facilities that can allow individual people ( Read more... ) -
Error-correction isn't free
We have ideas about things. We discover problems with our ideas, situations they don't work in or phenomena they can't explain. We seek to solve these problems, by replacing our ideas with better ideas, ones that do work for the situations or do explain the phenomena ( Read more... ) -
Recycling
(cross-posted from Facebook, at request ( Read more... ) -
Mmmm, Nesquik
And all is right with the world once more.