The IRS is prosecuting me, my copy of MS Windows has a dangerous virus and the Social Security Administration cancelled my social security number. All of this happened over the past week. Amazing, the things you learn when you take your phone off of DND for a week. I needed to keep things "open" for awhile, but I'll be going back to DND soon, so I can focus on sending money to Nigeria so that I can get rich.
From a visit to the St. Louis Zoo today. The convoluted photo is THREE underwater hippos and dozens of cichlids. It was overcast and in the 40s, which made it a perfect day to see animals and avoid crowds. The zoo is always a good option for walking and photography - it's about five miles from my house and admission is free (it is supported with a dedicated tax). Whenever I sleep, I'm sleeping within five miles of lions, tigers and bears and hippos and many other animals of which I don't know their names. When my daughters were small, we often went to the zoo. It is now clear that I wasn't going there solely for the benefit of my daughters . . .
The biggest generator of long term results is learning to do things when you don't feel like doing them. Discipline is more reliable than motivation.
I've long been fascinated by the occasional willingness by people to go from idea to reality. Ideas are a dime a dozen. To move to reality takes that first step. Taking the first step takes courage, a willingness to possibly fail. That courage includes a willingness that other people (and often you, yourself) will laugh at your attempts that don't work. We need the strength to take that first step even though we know that many or most of those first steps will end in failure. Some of our first steps will even be laughed at by others, sometimes by others who we consider our friends. Good friends will support us even in our failed attempts. Good friends do not step on our dreams. Those who laugh at us for our failures are not good friends--they don't understand us and they don't understand what it takes to succeed. It takes grit It takes many failures to succeed.
Here's to good friends and courage and the ability to laugh back at those who laugh at our failures! Today's assignment: Go take that first step to make an idea become reality. Today, take that first step that will probably fail. The alternative is to waste away your life.
Alan Sokal knows a thing or two about bullshit. He single-handedly made a mockery of Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. His 1996 article,
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," was published in the journal's spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in the magazine Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.
The reemergence of post-modernism, now in the form of Woke culture concerns Sokal in a big way, as he writes in ARC:
What postmodernist relativism has wrought is, rather, something more insidious: by devaluing the concept of objective truth, it has undermined our own ability to combat objective untruths—to develop herd immunity to a pandemic of viral disinformation, as one writer eloquently put it. Now the genie is out of the bottle, and I honestly don't know how to put it back in.
From the Turkish architecture firm Hayri Atak Architectural Design Studio. Scroll all the way down this Daily Mail article to see some eye-popping concepts, some of them turning into reality.