“nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly for it expresses a need” ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest Kokoro is a 1914 Japanese novel by Natsume Soseki(夏目 漱石). It is the final part of a triology starting with To the Spring Equinox and Beyong (1912) and followed by The Wayfarer (1912). Its title was first printed as Kokoro: Sensei no isho (心 先生の遺書). However, it was usually read as the heart of things. ...

What We Are What we are? We say we want to become what we are or what we have an intent to be. We read the possibilities, or try. We get to some. We think we know how to read. We recognize a word, here and there, a syllable: male, it says perhaps, or female, talent - look what you could do - or love, it says, love is what we mean. Being at any cost: in the end, the cost is terrible but so is the lure to us. We see it move and shine and swallow it. We say we are and this is what we are as to say we should be and this is what to be and this is how. But, oh, it isn't so. Metonymy As An Approach To A Real World Whether what we sense of this world is the what of this world only, or the what of which of several possible worlds - which what?- something of what we sense may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense. For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place, not thinking that this is the real world. Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time; conceded, that 'here' is anywhere we bound and fill a space; conceded, we make a world: is something caught there, contained there, something real, something which we can sense? Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw the light lie in the deep chasm of a street, palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in from say, the sea, a purity of space. The Holding Of lovers, one senses how, coupled, their joy is to think their singleness, together, to find themselves; how, holding each other, they think to hold as well as themselves, the truth, reality. We honor their wanting; what better could we want than that? Or, more than honor, we feel what they feel. If not for another sense, then this were all: we sense that what they hold is not the truth. The World I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world; but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere. There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no. I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.

Again and again Bachmann shows how “the flawed language that has been passed onto us” can lead us to question what we know to be real, our own suffering selves included, and she asks what it means to grapple with these antinomies of world and word as public and political matters, not just private ones—indeed what it means to be a writer at all. “If we had the word, if we had language, we would not need weapons,” she said in a 1959 lecture. Having lived through the war herself, she meant it. ...

USA Last night two old men debated to show their incompetence. Too old and too bad. Today, “The Supreme Court on Friday reduced the authority of executive agencies, sweeping aside a longstanding legal precedent that required courts to defer to the expertise of federal administrators in carrying out laws passed by Congress.” And, “Conservatives have now completed their generational goals of overturning Abortion, Affirmative Action, and Chevron. If y’all don’t think Obergefell and gay marriage is next on the chopping block, you must read …” ...

not reading The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.” ...

The empty brain, Aeon Robert Epstein Senses, reflexes and learning mechanisms – this is what we start with, and it is quite a lot, when you think about it. If we lacked any of these capabilities at birth, we would probably have trouble surviving. computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms. ...

Come across a blog on how to use OCR on a mac. The steps are as follows. open the shortcuts app in the Applications folder click + button to create a new shortcut in the right sidebar, search for “extract text” drag “Extract Text from Image” in the list of possible actions from the right side bar into the main area on the left in the “Extract Text from Image” action, click on the pale “Image” and pick “Shortcut Input”, there is a “Receive Any Input from Nowhere” action appearing above the “Extract text from Image” back to the right sidebar, search for “copy” and drag “Copy to Clipboard” action right below the “Extract Text from Image”. name your shortcut as “ocr-text” Basically you have setup a shortcut. Now you can try out this shortcut from terminal. ...

Finally have some time to think about the past weeks. Michel Foucault: I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end. ...

Each of us has a window, that is ourselves. If we sample fast enough according to Nyquist-Shannon’s sampling theorem, we may reconstruct the world viewed through this window. Most of time, our views are just partial and approximate. It’s not so even because we are not fast enough and long enough. It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present. -- Charles Dickens. David Copperfield There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor. -- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. -- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations Last winter, I had this idea and started to design and to experiment. At first I’d like its name LEDO (LED origami) and it’s close to LEGO. But a quick search revealed that it’s taken. Then I’d like to name it Light Origami or Origami Pixel. During the winter, I seldom solder. But it’s spring now, the concept has been validated after severl iterations. ...

每个人的生命都是通向自我的征途，是对一条道路的尝试，是一条小径的悄然召唤。觉醒的人只有一项义务：找到自我，固守自我，沿着自己的路向前走，不管它通向哪里。– 黑塞 I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. -- Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024) Steve Stewart-Williams: Psychologists have posited hundreds of cognitive biases over the years. A fascinating recent paper argues that they all boil down to one of a handful of fundamental beliefs coupled with confirmation bias. ...