drmstream[writing]

Last night I made a start at writ­ing this down, then fal­tered when I saw how late it was, real­ized that my mind wasn’t nearly quiet enough to go to sleep and ques­tioned whether the first few phrases that had formed in my mind were going to lead to any­where. This morn­ing I got out […]

  The over­crowded mind can lead to an unset­tled soul. Over the years I’ve learned to trust my tech­niques for qui­et­ing my mind. I let my con­scious­ness float, drift into an unde­fined space that sus­pends the for­ward momen­tum of thought, qui­ets down the chat­ter and waits for a struc­ture to form. Even as I wait the […]

The things I couldn’t learn in school:  chem­istry, physics, other lan­guages.  These have become the things that are at the core of under­stand­ing. At one not-to-distant point in time, under­stand­ing human nature was the prove­nance of the human­i­ties, with some sprin­kling of the pseudo-science of anthro­pol­ogy sprin­kled in.  Con­text and com­par­i­son gave you the framework […]

Fre­quent and sub­stan­tial con­ver­sa­tions with oth­ers cre­ates a sense of well-being, accord­ing to a psy­chol­ogy study reported in Sci­ence Daily this morn­ing. Greater well-being was related to spend­ing less time alone and more time talk­ing to oth­ers: The hap­pi­est par­tic­i­pants spent 25% less time alone and 70% more time talk­ing than the unhap­pi­est par­tic­i­pants. In […]

You are read­ing this on a device pow­ered by a micro-processor, ren­dered by photo-electric diodes, built from bits and bytes. You are pro­cess­ing the sig­ni­fier of each let­ter in its encoded mean­ing through each word, and cumu­la­tively, through the com­bi­na­tion of words that appear on the screen. The con­tract between you and I is that […]

Over at Pre­dictably Irra­tional, Dan Ariely uses Google’s search prompt to explore the dif­fer­ence between the ques­tions men are ask­ing about their girl­friends and women are ask­ing about their boyfriends. Look­ing at the top ques­tions, we can intuit some basic rela­tion­ship rules that will give peo­ple imme­di­ate sat­is­fac­tion. If you want to get a blowjob, […]

via tsutpen.blogspot.com The past unerr­ingly antic­i­pates the future. The form fac­tor is just dif­fer­ent. from Dan McCarthy’s Stream

Be con­fi­dent in see­ing what is in front of you. From Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can, a rebut­tal to the phe­nom­e­non of pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy, summed up in the equa­tion: H = S + C + V (Hap­pi­ness = your Set range + the Cir­cum­stances of your life + the fac­tors under your Vol­un­tary con­trol) “Human intel­lec­tual progress, such as […]

via neuronarrative.wordpress.com A the­ory that emo­tion is one of the ear­li­est attrib­utes that evolved in the genome. Emo­tion is, in fact, a rudi­men­tary sys­tem that we have to adapt to the more com­plex sys­tems, such as cul­ture and civ­i­liza­tion, that have evolved to help assure the best pos­si­ble behav­iors for the prop­a­ga­tion of the species.

Just how bound up nat­ural beauty is with art beauty is con­firmed by the expe­ri­ence of the for­mer. For it, nature is exclu­sively appear­ance, never the stuff of labor and the repro­duc­tion of life, let alone the sub-stratum of sci­ence. Like the expe­ri­ence of art, the aes­thetic expe­ri­ence is that of images. Nature, as appearing […]