Most of us young kids who play at nosebleed stakes don’t really have any clear idea about the actual value of the money we win or lose...this blind spot gives us the freedom to always make the right move, regardless of the amount at stake, because our judgment isn’t clouded by any possible ramifications.

Men are born soft and supple;
dead they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born tender and pliant;
dead, they are brittle and dry.

Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
is a disciple of life.

The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.

…if people don’t understand the relationship between their actions and their personal outcomes, we have no reason to believe that they will behave in a utility-maximizing way.

What really gives people meaning and happiness is a combination of four things: Control over what they’re doing, progress in what they’re pursuing, being connected with others, and being part of something they enjoy that’s bigger than themselves.

Almost four years ago. Basil plant died. Still making coffee.

— via metalsucks

I should be working but just watching the streaming vid on msnbc of the cheering crowds across Egypt upon the news that Mubarack has stepped down. This is an amazing watershed moment. My initial, off-the-cuff thoughts:

1. 1) OK People of Egypt, you have a real shot at a homegrown democracy here, can you keep it?
2. 2) The real work starts now.
3. 3) How does this effect the strategies people will use in other regimes across the world to effect change? Nothing succeeds like a successful example.
4. 4) What is the takeaway for repressive regimes. What have they learned not to do in order to maintain power.
5. 5) If Egypt does make the transition to a full fledged functioning democracy, this would be stunning in terms of it's peaceful nature and lack of comparative violence. Should also serve as an example to shut the fucking assholes up on the both sides of the political spectrum who argue that Islam is incapable of creating a functioning democracy.
6. 6) Reiterate point 2 - the real hard work starts now.

But by god I hope they pull this off.

if you look at a task as being impossible you wont be surprised if you fail. its ok to call things hard when they are but realize that the way you think shapes things. we constantly sort and compartmentalize our world. we fit things into boxes that we understand and are all too quick to truncate or mislabel out of fucking laziness or in an attempt to protect our ego. here is a question, what use is an ego that is so easily shattered? what kind of "self" isn't up to that kind of test? our sense of self is a tool. it can be a weapon. it is the root, the why and the how. so make it hard. keep a keen edge. wield it with the confidence that comes from a familiarity with its essence, and its limits. lies stick like rust and too much time in the dark can leave it brittle and ineffectual. test your metal. your temper. flex and grind, break and rebuild. these words are not accidents, and these tools are not for display. if they are beautiful it is because they are functional. useful. crafted deliberately - with a goal in mind.

You have to have a formula that's absolutely strong enough to hold anything. That's where people like me are very fortunate. I have a kind of innate sense of structure, which also makes me a good mimic. It's very close to mathematics. When I wrote a computer game a few years ago, it was in some ways the easiest job I'd ever had because it's all structure, and the guys know it has to be. If you're talking to a Hollywood person they never know what they're doing structurally. They ask for changes and everything falls apart, but computer game people are just perfect because they know the purpose of every element.

A series of well done renderings courtesy of cartoonist Adam Watson. Check out the whole batch.

There is quite a lot of Japanese expat culture here in NYC. I thought that as opportunity and occasion warrants it, I'd share some of it. One of my favorite ramen noodle joints is Ippudo over on 4th Avenue between 9th & 10th streets.

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There are quite a number of ramen places in NYC and have been for a longtime. I remember going to one with my dad when he worked in midtown in the late 1970's. I distinctly remember the long counter with Japanese businessmen belly to the bar slurping up the broth.But Ippudo is a different animal. In Japan Ippudo had the reputation of the noodle joint the college kids would go to. But once transferred to Manhattan Isle it becomes Ramen as high art.

Being a creature of habit, I always go for the shoyu ramen, which is my favorite. I always order the edamame, a house salad, a cold Kirin beer and an order of the pork buns as well.

But go early, as the place fills up quick. They don't take reservations and waits for a table over an hour are pretty much par for the course during the busy hours.

A few blocks away from Ippudo, over on 3rd Avenue & 10th Street is the best downtown Japanese market - Sunrise Mart. I get sent here regularly by my wife to buy industrial size bags of rice. A quick ride up a small, non-descript elevator dumps you into this second floor grocery that seemed transported directly from Tokyo. The place is stocked to the gills with many typical Japanese staples. A dizzying array of tofu, octopus tentacles, Pocky of all flavors, and thousands of other small items which will leave the non-Japanese bewildered and bemused.

And welcome to Snowpocalypse III here in NYC. We got fifteen inches over night in Central Park. I got up and out early with the Wee Peanut and snapped a bunch of pics of this Winter Wonderland.

Check out the pics

Another winter day in New York City, and another day of snow. I'm working out of the Oval library in Stuyvesant Town and this the view from where I sit.

I don't have an iPhone. I own a 4th generation iPod Touch. I love the thing for a million reasons - mp3 player, podcasts, book reader, note taking, pocketable internet access - but I have really come to love it for it's stunning collection of available wonky photography & video apps, with their cheap post processing algorithms. Sure, these processed images might all look dated in a few years, but what the heck, right? And truth be told the Touch's camera resolution isn't all that great to start with, especially compared to the one that's bundled with the iPhone, so a little post processing isn't really going to matter too much in the long run.

Among my favorite apps are the popular Instagram with it's fun filters and Twitter integration. I also love Pocketbooth (creates an old time photobooth photo strip), GIFVid (makes animated gifs from vid you shoot), 8mm Vintage (adds vintage film effects to vids as you shoot), Camera+. A recent addition to my collection is PicUploader which makes sending your images to various social media sites - in my case Flickr & Twitter - very easy. PicUploader's developer, mudaimemo also has a couple of other photography iOS apps I have in my kit - monochromia & SkipBleach.

To be honest I go for the gimmicky apps, with the exception of Camera+. Like I said up thread, I'm working with a 0.92 megapixels resolution which shoots photos in 960×720 and videos in 1280×720, so I don't mind being gimmicky with the thing. That said, in bright light the camera does take some nice pics. But in the end the other camera's in my house are a Nikon D40 DSLR and a Sony NEX-5, so a less than 1 megapixel camera is the runt of the house. A good resource to follow for all things iOS photography is iphoneography. If you have a good app to recommend I'd love to know about it.

We have entered a new Middle Ages: an era that most resembles the pre-Westphalian era of nearly 1,000 years ago. That was the period of history when the East was as powerful (if not more so) than the West, cities mattered more than nations, powerful dynasties and trading companies were engines of growth and innovation, private mercenaries fought in all wars, religious crusades shaped inter-cultural relations, and new trade routes over land and sea forged the world’s first (nearly) global economy.

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He continues:

Davos has nothing to do with sovereignty and everything to do with authority: it’s peer-to-peer among anybody who’s somebody. Where else do hundreds of Fortune 500 CEOs, American cabinet secretaries, the mayor of London, prime minister of Catalonia, chairman of China’s Export-Import Bank, investor-statesmen like George Soros, rock-star activists like Bono, and billionaire hybrid executive philanthropists like Bill Gates speak directly and honestly, and form new ventures on the spot?

We're all fucking peasants as far as they can see.

Well, if The Man is myself that is. Spending the first part of the day working on a new design for my independent one man web design concern, elemntl. I actually like how this is coming along. Amazing how much time it takes to keep tweaking things, stepping back, stare at it and then re-tweak again and again. Now to turn the design into code and see if I can get it up on the web. Hopefully it'll be done by the end of the day.

After I get the site done, then I can design some letterpress business cards. It never ends, does it…

Taken from the Surf Blog Spot.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group: fifty pound of pots rated an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an A.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Penetrate adversary’s moral-mental-physical being to dissolve his moral fiber, disorient his mental images, disrupt his operations, and overload his system, as well as subvert, shatter, seize, or otherwise subdue those moral-mental-physical bastions, connections, or activities that he depends upon, in order to destroy internal harmony, produce paralysis, and collapse adversary’s will to resist.

These are the ideals of the left – a belief in the power and honor of human work in community, and no one speaks [to] them because they shine far too stark a light on the cancer that has pervaded the culture.

So says a commenter at Yves Smith's Naked Capitalism site in a blog post entitled On the Lack of Left Wing Discourse in the Blogosphere who hits the proverbial nail on it's head. I urge you to read the blog post that inspired such a simple and truthful comment, and in turn, the posting at L’Hôte that planted the seeds to Yves post.

A samurai asked a Zen master if heaven and hell existed. The Zen master replied, "Who are you?"The samurai replied, "I’m a samurai. I guard the Shogun."The Zen master said, "You, a samurai. What ruler would have you as a guard? You look more like a thief or a begger."The angered samurai began to draw his sword out of his scabbard. The Zen master next said, "You call that a sword? I bet it’s way to dull to cut my head off."The samurai pulls his sword out and is about to strike a blow and the Zen master says, "Here open the gates of hell."At hearing these words the samurai understood the master’s purpose and put his sword back into it’s scabbard and at this the Zen master smiled and gently said, "And here open the gates of heaven."

For years I always thought about this story and how it taught that our own actions and responses to the world dictate our understanding and place in it, and on that level the story is as true as it is. We can, and do, literally choose whether our days are spent in heaven or hell by our perception of events and the subsequent effects of our actions based on those perceptions.

Recently though, upon thinking of this story in a different context, a different lesson was there as well. Since on the initial reading we focus on the Samurai asking the question, the Zen Master is merely a vehicle for the lesson in the story, and that insight tends to be what we take away. And it's a pretty good lesson. But I'd like to point out a different lesson that I think lies buried in the story too, if you look at it from a different angle.

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Focus on the Zen Master and not on the Samurai. What does the Zen Master do? He easily and confidently manipulates the Samurai. His simple questions toy with the Samurai's mindset and framing of reality - and effortlessly so. While the Samurai, in his actions is about to willingly step between heaven and hell mindlessly based on the options manufactured by the Zen master, it is the master who actually presents the gates (the choices) themselves. This really struck me, because what if the goal of the Zen Master was not so altruistic? What if he didn't use this to instruct the Samurai but to merely manipulate him? And what does this tell us of those who have the knowledge, position or ability to understand and frame a reality and get others to do their bidding by simply understanding what motivates them?

Yes, this is a social and political commentary, because it is easy to say to people "You have the ability to choose between heaven and hell", and to a certain extent we do have that choice, but I think that alone is not enough - we have to ask ourselves exactly who's heaven and who's hell are we being given a choice of? And who is presenting us with those choices, what their motivations are (to instruct? to deceive? to sell you something?) and why?

Living in the 21st century where entertainment and news are combined, where journalism is bought and sold to the highest corporate bidder, where education is watered down and underfunded, one has to have a finely honed bullshit filter if one hopes to have any enlightenment about our situation. And how many who are in positions to provide us with information about reality are doing so with altruistic intentions to instruct us?

I leave you to ponder that and take what lessons you will.