Viewing profile — asdflkj

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 other…

A matchmaking amusement park is also called a bar.

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 the…

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 …

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 b…

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…

And where does this "need" come from?

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…

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 decisi…

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 e…

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 com…

The guy in the video says energy expenditure and feeling good are synonymous. How about with opiates?

Thanks--I'll check them out. I hope it's the kind of stuff that is only called philosophy, but actually falls under the purview of science, which doesn't yet have a framework to de…

You're "not talking about how we build them", but you were responding to my post where I am talking about how we build them. I'm gonna say it again: I don't understand this tendenc…

Sweet! I've got this other problem, though--I really enjoy sunshine. Anyone got a cure for that?

Mathematics and physics are products of the mind, obviously. Mathematicians and physicists do their work by using their minds. They don't channel some divine truth--they merely fil…

Mathematics is a product of the mind; the mind is a product of evolution; evolution is a product of natural laws. If you want answers to these questions, it helps to look at what w…

Which college?

I'm not talking about "most people". I'm talking about some significant subset of smart people who would love hacking, but don't know what it is yet because they weren't given a pr…

Programming is only an impressive-sounding "skillset" and not a simple skill, like riding a bicycle (at least in its rudimentary form), because of how awful the interfaces are betw…

Here is why this common metaphor is wrong: the only useful thing cars do is get you from point A to point B. Mucking around with the innards is pointless unless you like doing it. …

Here is the real problem with desktop Linux: nobody wants to take the only thing that Linux is good at, and make it better. I'm talking about hackability. Ubuntu and similar system…

Something like what? Litvinenko was as absolute nobody, without access to any privileged information, and without any original ideas. He is only famous for dying in a bizare way. P…