mvleming

Godspeed brother, I wish you the best. You'll be in my thoughts

Check out the Unfolding of Language if you're interest in the Language Instinct. Also Elephant in the Room made me think of the Master and his Emissary, very interesting book, check that one out too.

This sounds like it could be satire.

I second this. Really great videos that balance breath vs depth well and that are easily digestible. The guy is also enjoyable to listen to.

I am not associated with Jordan Leigh nor Decyper.TV in any way except as a customer.

Yep great example, didn't remember to mention that too.

To expand on your point for others about mental exercises: if you experience pain, say, in your leg during a squat, if you mentally visualize doing a squat, and imagine doing it while not feeling pain, and practice doing that visualization, that will help you feel less pain when you actually get around to doing a squat.

Another way I've heard people treat phantom limb is by getting a tall standing mirror, so that their other limb in the mirror looks like their missing limb. And then they will move their limb and that will help treat the pain they feel in their phantom limb.

I haven't checked out Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection but if you want another book that I think speaks from a similar angle, and that I know has a scientific grounding, check out A Guide to Better Movement by Todd Hargrove[1].

The crux of some recent research into pain can be summarized in a few points:

* Sometimes you'll hear patients talk about pain and look at their area of pain and find nothing in their bones/muscles/etc that would indicate they should experience pain, and sometimes you'll look at other patients and their bones/muscles/etc and find they should experience pain but they don't.

* If you have three cups of water–two of them warm, the middle one cold–and stick a finger in each cup, your finger that is in the middle, cold cup will actually feel a hot, burning sensation. Try it yourself. Pain can be misleading and not indicative of actual danger.

* Similarly, ever play a sport and not feel an injury until the next day? (I'm not talking about soreness.) This indicates that pain can be silenced, and that underlying physical damage doesn't immediately and directly cause a sensation of pain.

The mind-body connection in essence is this: your body is the territory, and your mind is the map. Your map of the territory can become out of sync with the way the territory actually is. The body is incredibly adaptable, if you teach your body to feel pain, it will, if you teach your body to move freely, it will. This doesn't mean, if you're feeling pain, go and do crazy things and hump the dragon so to speak. It does mean: approach the dragon. Lean into the pain. Allow yourself to feel pain. Recognize the pain and listen to it and learn more about where the flare-up line exists in your body. Constantly strive to elevate where the flare-up line is, mindfully and with good vibes. :)

Increasingly we're moving away from a past where physical pain is stigmatized.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Better-Movement-Science-Practic...

Sounds like you might like the book A Guide to Better Movement by Todd Hargrove.

Check out the sibling comment I just added: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8027794

According to these two blog posts, [1] and [2], the source is the film The Mindscape of Alan Moore. [3] I love the quote too, I just learned of it.

[1] http://dailyhumanist.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/the-world-is-r...

[2] http://pvewood.blogspot.fr/2012/04/some-alan-moore-quotation...

[3] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0410321/

That was it! Thank you so much, I kept googling skill share which would give me results for skillshare.com. So glad the first comment helped me find it, thanks again.

Thank you for posing this question! I'm going to love digging through these videos.

Here are mine:

From PandoDaily, Fireside Chat With Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yPfxcqEXhE

From CoinSumm.it, Bitcoin Fireside Chat with Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iir5J6Z3Z1Q

From The Lean Startup Conference, Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and Eric Ries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpwSzyqTG0E

And by far the one that made the biggest impression on me, from PandoDaily, Fireside Chat With Nasty Gal CEO Sophia Amoruso: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y04gnM57Sow

From that interview alone Sophia Amoruso became a huge role model for me.

From my point of view, this is not too unlike what we have without Bitcoin. With USD or CAD, consumers still have to make a decision whether it is worth exchanging a number of dollars a point in time for something else when instead they can use that money to make more money and eventually have "30 bucks next year".

I can see how making more money with Bitcoin is different than with USD or CAD though, if I were to consider only what you've laid out. With the latter two currencies, I would have to learn about different investment strategies and figure out what would actually make me more money, things as a consumer I don't even know about. But with Bitcoin, I could just hold onto them and except to have more money in the future.

What I am trying to say is I don't think what you've laid out is something new, this incentive–to hold onto money so I can more the future–already exists with our currencies today, but Bitcoin happens to give a little spin to that incentivize–which is it'll easier to have more money in the future.

I would love to hear from a real economist too but I don't think it hurts to take our brains out on a little walk.

I think so: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/wp-content/uploads/2014...

Caption that went with the photo:

> Engineering manager Scott Goodson reclines in the reclining workstation he built at Facebook HQ.

From: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/facebook-paper/

Edit: Added caption.

Hey, I've started to learn about devops and systems administration recently and I've learned a ton in this thread and this article, so thanks for that and thanks to everyone else.

But do you know of any good resources to learn about those two things? And I'm taking about basic devops, before you even start worrying about automating, and the things you would actually automate–because I don't know what it is I should be doing in the first place.

Things like what you should be doing right after you SSH into your server, how to make your server secure, how to use nginx, chmod'ing permissions of files correctly, and things I don't even know about.

Is there a One Month Rails or Michael Hartl's RoR Tutorial for devops/sys admin?

Regardless, thanks for taking the time to read this :)

This is off-topic, but because I've just recently started my foray into devops/systems administration do you know any lists of good resources to learn about those two things? I'd love to see a guide like this [1] except that's for analytics.

Things like what you should do right after you SSH into a server, how to make your server secure, setting up nginx, chmod'ing permissions of files correctly, and things I don't even know.

Regardless if you get back to me, I appreciate you taking the time to read this :)

[1] https://segment.io/academy/

I just laughed out loud. Thanks!

I disagree. I'd say the free month is not for a tweet, but for the number of users who sign up because of your tweet and then how much those users end up paying to use the product. If just one user signs up because of your tweet and pays to use the product for a month, then what's been given away has been earned back. And none of this says how much the product should be valued quantitatively, i.e. how much one month is worth.

On the other hand, you do comment about perception–if the users perceive the product to worth less because of this deal, "a tweet for a free month", the rationale behind why the deal is good for the product might not do anything to offset that loss in perceived value.

Huh, I thought you could use a beta phase to promote the app for the opposite reason—by having a beta phase you can have a huge release to the public, as opposed to marketing the app must be a revolutionary idea because it's in its beta phase.

Which makes me want to ask: does a beta phase mean it's only open for use to those who've requested and have been given access? Or can you have an app in the beta phase and also have it open for everyone to use?

Your comment reminds me of this discussion I had before here on HN and someone made a reply that has stuck with me to this day in its eloquence. I'll quote it here because I want to share what comment I'm talking about but out of context I think it makes little sense and I think you should read the thread [1]–it's very relevant to what we're talking about here.

> Essentially it is trying to say that we are at a global maximum in a space that is probably more nonlinear. In fact our genes may well be suboptimal in some respects even if you think they have "control".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4906810, just read the first four comments from the top, mvleming -> mcherm -> mvleming -> justincormack

The Machinery of Life [1] is a fantastic book, I was one of those curious laymen and boy did it saturate my thirst for learning about microbiology. I think it's close to the time I read it again.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Machinery-Life-David-Goodsell/dp/0...

Edit: Whoops, no Markdown support. Revised link to use footnote.

Is it? I don't know how to look for whether a photo is in the public domain, but I did just Google with the image. https://encrypted.google.com/search?tbs=sbi:AMhZZisuyc26lmhJ...

Was that an opinion you just had right there?

Wow, this is a incredible visualization of how compression works. I never understood how it worked before, but the simple mentioning of pointers and then that video was all it took for me.

I've always wondered if this is true: If we approach infinite computational power, does the amount of information we need to represent data decrease? (Excuse any incorrect use of my terminology here.) I think about a number like pi that, as far as we know, has an infinite number of digits, and theoretically speaking every message is contained in that number. So if we just get the pointer of where that message is contained in the number and then calculate the number up to that pointer then we'll have ourselves the message. Hence, more computational power, less information needed.

I know there's a part in the ear called the cochlea but I thought the company just added the letter r to the word and made that their name; I didn't know the word existed before the company. Thanks!

Is it called a Cochlear Implant when Advanced Bionics makes it? Do you know if Cochlear is going to release a processor that's bluetooth-enabled?

I haven't read about SCT, but in the wikipedia article about social constructionism I read: "When we say that something is socially constructed, we are focusing on its dependence on contingent variables of our social selves rather than any inherent quality that it possesses in itself." You said: "on top of those there is a whole conflicting mess of different desirable appearances which depend upon the period, culture, and person, driven by all the complexities of interacting human beings." At first I thought are "the period, culture, and person" not "contingent variables of our social selves"? But you went on to say "those factors can be boiled down to some fairly simple drives which have all emerged for one reason: to maximise reproductive success." In other words, you're saying those factors can be boiled down to something that is an inherent quality that we possess in ourselves, which is we maximise reproductive success.

Does this make sense? I dislike SCT too now but I wasn't trying to imply the perfect image society creates is socially constructed when I said "personifying what society has deemed as the perfect image." I meant regardless of whether society is socially constructed or not, this system that I'm referring to as "society" creates an ideal image of what a human being should look like. If society is not socially constructed, and is in fact defined by our biology, then that would mean this ideal image also originates from our biology. Regardless of all this, there is a perfect image we strive for.

I feel like we're on the same page, and I totally relate to your view that, and I'm going to paraphrase you: "it is in our nature to be highly responsive to our nurture." Our nurture is not an individual entity from the system, our nurture is grounded by our biology.

I agree with you. I've read about how a curvy figure (a high hip-to-waist ratio) is more attractive to males because it means offspring are more likely to survive when they pop out of the woman (small hips and big brains don't go well together).

The point I was trying to make though is there are some aesthetic qualities we like that are not evolutionary products, the example I gave was the duckface. Another example is women in China bind their feet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding), or yet another is Kayan women elongate their necks (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ak1yxTngxW4/Tnen0_FXpgI/AAAAAAAAAW...).

I believe what aesthetic qualities we like are the result of our nature and our nurture, and it is in this way I believe society does create a perfect image.

You think the duckface is an aesthetic quality we've evolved to have a taste for?

I never thought about it in that way, and that is interesting. It's like the more we have the opportunity to not look human, we take that opportunity to look more human. But, thinking about it, it makes sense. It's personifying what society has deemed as the perfect image. In response to your comment, I think you just need to give culture time to experiment with new ideas when new opportunities rise up. I've actually never played in an avatar world, but I imagine, for example in Second Life, new styles or physiques. Maybe you could tell me?

If you look to history, you can see overtime we acquire new ways of changing ourselves. There was a time when there wasn't makeup, but nowadays people can use makeup and change their appearance. Same thing with dying your hair, getting a plastic surgery, or arguably even body building: by getting this down to a science, we can figure out how to best change our physique. But really, all of these methods are crude, really crude.

But I'm super excited about what the next of couple of decades will do change this. I think we're on the verge of being able to completely define ourselves, and I don't just mean in the sense of designer children, i.e. genetics. I'm also thinking more along the lines of augmented reality and new bionic bodies.

Even today, there is a woman, Aimee Mullins, who has prosthetic legs. In her TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics...), she talked about how she could redesign her legs however she wanted. For example, she could be 6 inches taller, or when she did a fashion shoot, she could have cheetah legs: http://img0.liveinternet.ru/images/attach/b/3/17/452/1745283.... (NSFW?) At one point in the talk, a person from the audience shouted out "It's not fair!"

And this is epochal, right? This is just a sign of what's to come. You look at Second Life and you see these avatars people have designed for themselves, they have control over how big their chest is, what skin colour they are, height, whatever. I can't help but dream of that being extrapolated to the real world, where we have complete control over how we express ourselves physically. Everybody would feel comfortable in their skin, everybody would look super-sexy, and we would find radical new ways of expressing ourselves (personally I would love blue fur).

Now I know what some of you are thinking right now, isn't this really superficial? In Second Life we already see huge tits and perfect abs. In one sense, culture becomes magnified tremendously. The body almost becomes a blank canvas to extrapolate the mind onto. But also, it's not superficial at all, it's exactly the opposite.

Let me explain it by posing you this question: what defines you? I've thought long and hard about this, and I've come to the answer: you are defined by what you can't change. When OP can't change how tall he is, he's defined by that, especially so in his workplace. On the flip side, when you can change something about yourself, that is a means of expressing who you are. We can change the style and the colour of our hair, and this is a huge part of culture: just look at all those hair magazines.

So what we have here is you are defined by what you can't change and what you can change is a means of expressing who you are. But, and this is the point I'm trying to get at, when you can change something that you couldn't change before, what defines you becomes smaller. So when in the next couple of decades, when we can change our sex, skin colour, physique, species?, what will truly define us becomes an interesting question.

And it is in this sense how it is exactly the opposite of superficial.

There's a Buddha saying: "You are not your thoughts." And you are not your body either.