Personal

Started: 2018-05-07 Finished: 2018-05-10 Done with Artemis. If you like sci-fi well told, if you liked the Martian, you’ll love Artemis. I did audio this time and was in for a pleasant surprise. Rosario Dawson reads the book. Yes. That Rosario “Badass” Dawson! And of course, she makes for a badass narrator too. Listening to her go, “Shit! Shit! Shittity Shit!” is a hoot. Instead of a solo guy stranded on Mars, this one is all about the first lunar city (the titular Artemis) with it’s settlement domes and loads of intrigue ...

I keep going on in the channel1 about how I didn’t learn this until it was too late. But it doesn’t bother me at all. Because “Disguise your judgement. You don’t need to show people how smart you are. I didn’t learn this until my early 80s.” — Charlie Munger If Munger can still be learning at 96, so can I :) I hang out at #dgplug on the irc.freenode.net server most days ↩︎ ...

“Since I was very young, I’ve played all kinds of music: bar mitzvah music, Sousa marches, strip-club music, jazz, pop. Everything. I didn’t have to learn a thing to do Michael Jackson.” “You’re supposed to use everything from the past. If you know where you come from, it’s easier to get where you’re going. Musical principles exist, man. Musicians today can’t go all the way with the music because they haven’t done their homework with the left brain. Music is emotion and science. You don’t have to practice emotion because that comes naturally. Technique is different. If you can’t get your finger between three and four and seven and eight on a piano, you can’t play. You can only get so far without technique. People limit themselves musically. Do these musicians know tango? Macumba? Yoruba music? Samba? Bossa nova? Salsa? Cha-cha?” ...

I recently subscribed to the The Great Courses Plus, so that I could bring myself up to speed on the Math needed to do my 12th standard exams. All these years, whenever I’ve tried to teach myself trigonometry (or other people have tried to explain it to me) it has always been an exercise in frustration, followed by the general exhortation to just mug it up. My brain sadly is not wired that way. I can and I will mug it up. But I do want to know what the first principles are, so that I have the ability to derive what I need. I need to understand. ...

Shit! Here’s an instance of reality outrunning your dreams. I was saving my pennies and then this had to happen. Reminds me of Dave Ramsey’s urging to grow slowly and David’s this here post.

Listening to Marcus du Sautoy’s A Brief History of Mathematics this weekend. In two hours, and ten episodes, du Sautoy spans the gamut of mathematicians from Leibniz & Newton the 1690s to the ensemble Bourbaki the 1930s Brief, rampaging and hugely entertaining, this is well worth a listen!