theblackbox

Saw a lecture by Tobi Delbruck at my uni last month and was really impressed by this application among others. Seems like some really interesting technology. Can post a link to the lecture recording (audio) if anyone wants it?

"dissociative identity disorder/multiple personality disorder" has been all but dropped by mainstream psychology. It's considered to be an artifact explained as being induced by a number of factors including attention seeking, desire to please therapist, extreme hypochondria and mimicry.

A possible title for such an article is a word I first read about when reading Isaiah Berlin and his students for some philosophy of mind work I was doing a few years back. The term they use is "Einfuhlung", which translates to a "feeling into" (empathy?) but one that is quite directly experienced. Thay claim that one cannot feel and be moved by the depth of woe (or any other emotion, for that matter) in a blues song, for instance, without having experienced it firsthand.

Once again the YC community surprises me in both it's depth and it's breadth. From someone who has found your (and Russell's) text invaluable, I say - thank you, sir.

And thank you PG/YC for giving me the opportunity to do so.

Yeah, I thought as much as well. It was said more in jest. I know a guy who put tonnes (3 or 4 I think) of slate tiling in his stern end and it only dropped it down half a foot or so in the water. Narrow boats usually have a flat bottom and weigh a huge amount, so they are pretty resillient... still, gyroscopes are interesting

Some sort of Gyroscope might appeal to both your sensibilities?

"Autowash!?"

</Obligatory Fifth Element Quote!>

I highly recommend a hammock to anyone that is wanting to save space. I slept in one for 2+ years, and haven't found anything as comfortable since. It takes a little while to get used to, but it's great for your back - despite what you may think.

Wasn't going to post as I struggle to justify the relevance of the parent and my response to the community, but think it's ultimately of little consequence and the words themselves are important to me, so...

~OT: I once worked as a charity fundraiser and had more than a few encounters with homelessness, one of which (a few years after leaving the job) left me quite stunned. The company was a bit of a stop-gap for those that could and would handle it, with accommodation, food, and a pretty interesting lifestyle all thrown in.

I once found myself in a pub, however, and a homeless guy came up and asked me for a bit of spare change. Having built up a healthy respect for people and torn down my impulse to judge on the basis of only a very small amount of information (from my exp. in said job), I gave the guy what I could when, looking in his eyes, I saw my friend. A guy I had worked with as a fundraiser, who, after a brief spell of bad luck had fallen through the gaps of society and ended up having to constantly climb. I did what I could for the guy, but more importantly he did so much for me - I had never realised destitution was so close (or that the climb back up was so high).

Another time I met something I can only describe as otherworldly.... it was almost sacred. Take what you will from it. I was approached (this was while fundraising) by a small, fat, black guy in comfortable, though slightly disheveled clothes in his late 50s or thereabouts. As he came close it occured to me that he didn't exist... I honestly cannot understand the instantaneous clarity of that thought... maybe he was just too much of a cliche for my mind to deal with, but there was something more, an aura that came from somewhere deep within him, from somewhere I don't think I have. He took my hand and started talking to me as though it was the most ordinary things in the world, and he proceeded to tell me about his pebble. He'd been fondling it in his other hand and as I noticed it he started telling me about where he'd found it and all the things that could have been while that pebble had remained hidden. And that, he said, was his point. My pebble was currently hidden, and I was close to finding it. It could be a stone, a coin, a woman or even the world! The point was that it was mine and that it had been sitting, passive, until the day I, and I alone, would come across it and bind myself to it...

I don't even know why that's worth sharing with you. Most people I tell, I'm sure, just think I was seduced by the romantic ramblings of a mad old man... maybe so, but I think that moment, myself, the old man and what he said deserve a great deal more dignity, even divinity, than that. I choose to make that moment spiritual (and I'm not by any means "religious")....

Herman Hesse - The Glass Bead Games (though I would hazard to say any of his famous five are worth reading - haven't got round to them all myself yet, though)

I read The Glass Bead Games after I happened across Timothy Leary's "The Politics of Ecstasy" (a good read but not great - his ignorance/arrogance get's in the way all too often). The thing that switched me onto HH was TLs insistance that the man had achieved enlightenment: I figured that was not to be missed!

HH won the Nobel Proze for literature shortly after it's publication, and I cannot overstate the majesty of this book - it is simply awe inspiring. Easy to read, with a persuasive storyline that seduces the reader into an abominably utopian world of intellectual rule (Epistocracy?).

I won't ruin it for any readers. The basic thrust of the tale is the student becoming the master in a world where the highest grand masters (of "the game") are revered with something approaching religious zeal.

It changed me. Fundamentally. Before reading it I was naive and starry eyed about what education could achieve, now I'm more aware than ever that humanity, educated or not, is still just a many faced beast. All these trappings of wealth, power, and intellect are just reigns temporarily thrown around this rampaging behemoth.

It's not so much an epiphany of despair or futility, strangely it is somehow quite the opposite. It's a realease. I can't quite explain it. It's something that sends me into wild flights of lyrical rhetoric about the nature of humanity and my own part in it. I don't think there is anything better that you can ask from a book.