- ...two old men in a corner in blue silk mandarin coats played mah jongg. They paid no attention to my coming; they played rapidly, identifying each piece by touch, and the noise was like shingle turning on a beach after a wave withdraws.
the quiet american
Erwin Schrodinger's What is Life? Just reread it after 20 years or so.What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.
serendipity. i have been meaning to submit this to hubski https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170126-information-theory-and-the-foundation-of-life/Even simple bacteria move with “purpose” toward sources of heat and nutrition. In his 1944 book What is Life?, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger expressed this by saying that living organisms feed on “negative entropy.”
Not my job. :) The point that Schrödinger makes in that essay is that it is not 'energy' that living things consume, but that we find streams of negative entropy into which we dump the entropy that we produce. It is this quality that he suggests is essential to the differentiation of living vs. non-living. The book contains his thoughts on consciousness as well. He dismantles the Western view of individual consciousness, and the existence of senses. Good stuff.
He thought for a moment. "Can you remember any great error that you committed in your early days, Duchess?" he asked, looking at her across the table. "A great many, I fear," she cried. "Then commit them over again," he said gravely. "To get back one's youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies." "A delightful theory!" she exclaimed. "I must put it into practice." "A dangerous theory!" came from Sir Thomas's tight lips. Lady Agatha shook her head, but could not help being amused. Mr. Erskine listened. "Yes," he continued, "that is one of the great secrets of life. Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes." Oscar Wilde's A Picture of Dorian Gray."[...]Ah! Lord Henry, I wish you would tell me how to become young again."
Quote from not-Lil is from Mark Manson's "Life is a Video Game -- Here Are the Cheat Codes" which I keep close at hand (first found via hubski of course): All reactions can be divided up in two ways: Solutions and Distractions. Solutions are actions and pursuits that resolve a problem preventing it from continuing or happening again in the future. Distractions are actions or pursuits designed to either make the Player unaware of the problem’s existence or to dull the pain the problem may be causing. If a Player feels they understand a problem and are capable of handling it, they will pursue a Solution. If players are just sick of Life’s shit, then they will likely pursue Distractions to help them pretend the problem isn’t actually there. This led to a lengthy meditation of my own about distractions v. solutions. I can include some of it here if anyone is interested -- but the more I thought about distractions v. solutions, the more the two start to merge. The ultimate problem requiring a distraction or solution is "What am I doing with my life?" This can be solved with distractions disguised as solutions. This can also be solved with solutions disguised as distractions. I apply this theory to my marriages, so you can see the rabbit hole I fell into.Players may respond to problems with either Solutions or Distractions. All players must meet problems with a reaction (even choosing not to react to a problem, is itself, a reaction).
Two from John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash 1929: and How you likin' Quiet American? It's on my list."There were still better ways of making money. In principle, New York banks could borrow money from the Federal Reserve bank for 5 per cent and re-lend it in the call market for 12. In practice they did. This was, possibly, the most profitable arbitrage operation of all time."
Margins - the cash which the speculator must supply in addition to the securities to protect the loan and which he must augment if the value of the collateral securities should fall and so lower the protection they provide - are effortlessly calculated and watched. The interest rate moves quickly and easily to keep the supply of funds adjusted to the demand. Wall Street, however, has never been able to express its pride in these arrangements. They are admirable and even wonderful only in relation to the purpose they servie. The purpose is to accommodate the speculator and facilitate speculation. But the purposes cannot be admitted. If Wall Street confessed this purpose, many thousands of moral men and women would have no choice but to condemn it for nurturing an evil thing and call for reform. Margin trading must be defended not on the grounds that it efficiently and ingeniously assists the speculator, but that it encourages the extra trading which changes a thin and anemic market into a thick and healthy one. At best this is a dull by-product and a dubious one. Wall Street, in these matters, is like a lovely and accomplished woman who must wear black cotton stockings, heavy woolen underwear, and parade her knowledge as a cook because, unhappily, her supreme accomplishment is as a harlot.