The universe

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2019/05/06/40120983/humans-in-the-future-will-abandon-the-universe-the-same-way-humans-in-the-past-abandoned-god

This poses an interesting concept, our "universe" is but a small area of a whole that is in thermal equilibrium, but small area can experience non equilibrium, thus giving rise to the concept of time within them.

What do you claim to care about, but fail to take action on?

So I ran across this in a blog post by Jon Skeet.  The question is a tough one, if we don't take action on something, do we really care about it?  If we do, why haven't we taken action on it?  Are we just trying to fool ourselves that we care about it?

Revelation, Reconciliation, and Time

I've been doing some thinking on the teachings of Jesus and the Book of Revelations.  First, forgive me if I get anything wrong, I'm not a big reader of the bible so I don't know it chapter and verse, I try to get the "big picture".  So, from what I'm understanding of the teachings of Jesus is that his ministry is all about the love of god, and how it is freely given by grace, not earned, and that we all should show this kind of love to everyone else.

John 3:16
For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that everyone who believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Through the years, many have noted the incongruity between the description of God, who loves the world so much that He sent His Son to die for our sins, and a being who would cause sinners to be tormented for eternity. Some have tried to reason around this inconsistency by saying that God’s greatness demands such punishment for sin. But this reasoning is flawed, for it contradicts the Scriptures.
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). Here, the opposite of receiving everlasting life is to “perish.” God has “no pleasure in the death of the wicked”—not their ongoing punishment (Ezekiel 33:11). He is not “willing that any should perish” (2 Peter 3:9).
Realizing that the Bible teaches that the wicked will be mercifully destroyed, some churches now refer to this teaching as annihilation. It is clearly a better explanation of what happens to the wicked.

 https://lifehopeandtruth.com/prophecy/revelation/lake-of-fire/

I don't find this interpretation any more comforting than the one I previously held where the "wicked" were tormented forever.  Annihilation seems no better a fate to me than eternal torment.

Matthew

Chapter 25

31 When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal. 

I fail to see how so simplistic a view can either land you in heaven or hell (whatever those might be), for who has always been either helpful or unhelpful.  What happens to those that have helped some strangers, but not all?  Were the followers of Jesus really so simplistic as to not see this problem?  I can't believe that, something has to have been lost, either to time or translation.  In either case, I don't see that Jesus would cast the "wicked" into either eternal torment or annihilation, that just doesn't fit with all his prior teaching of love.  What am I missing here?

The other thing completely unrelated I've been thinking about is how our measurement of time seems to affect our thinking and expectations.  It seems that societies that don't mark the passage of every second, hour, minute, ..., year have a more circular view of time (i.e. the flow of the seasons), whereas those that do have a linear view.  I live in one of the linear view societies, but I'm not convinced it is the best way to view things.  Look at our view on the environment, I think that's directly attributable to how we view time in a linear fashion, we don't see the way we treat things as coming back "full circle" and influencing the future like the more circular view would.  More on this later.

Today's Exercise: What is your dream goal?

So with the motivation series on headspace the exercise is to ask yourself a question and notice the feeling the question evokes, but not to answer the question (difficult to do).  Todays question was "What is your dream goal?"  I was actually pretty successful in the exercise and didn't try for answers, and did notice an immediate evocation of excitement at the question, almost like an electrical surge.  Pretty cool that just asking yourself the question can do something like that.

In other areas, I'm likely to be offered a permanent position with my current contract, so I get the joy of going through and comparing benefits to the ones I have with my contract agency, changing benefits if I accept, setting all that up again with every doctor.   Whee.

I've been slowly working on a website for IT people looking for "part time" positions.  I don't see much in the way out there as far as resource for this type of work.  It's probably a pretty niche market, but I think people will look for more of this in the future.  I know I would prefer to have several part time positions (if only your health benefits weren't so tied to your employer, but this will change as well) than one full time one, so I don't have all my eggs in one basket.

What's the most important thing in your life right now?

I've been doing headspace for over a year (off and on) and I just started the Motivation pack, and the focus of the first day was the question "What is the most important thing in your life right now?"  Now we weren't supposed to focus on an answer during the exercise, but of course that's difficult not to do.  As I expect most people with children would answer, my answer was "my kids".  Then I thought some more, and wondered about how and if my focus and actions reflected that.  Some tough questions there.  So, "What's the most important thing in your life right now?", and are you acting like it is?

State of the nation

Something else I just have to get out, I've written about this before.  From what I'm seeing and what I'm anticipating almost 2 years from now a lot more people need to read and absorb the concept.  We are becoming so polarized as a nation that I fear in the next presidential election we're going to tear ourselves apart.  This may be coming earlier due to Trump being president than it would have otherwise, but I think it would still be coming in the next several election cycles.  My reasoning on why Trump as accelerated this is that he is willing to use far more divisive tactics to win than most politicos.  We have become so divided that we no longer see the "other" side(s)0 as people/human, and are willing to call out for the death (or worse!) of those that hold opposing views to our own.  I don't see how people that hold these kinds of views can continue to function as a civil society.  I've read several accounts on the breakdown of modern countries into SHTF situations (Bosnia was the latest I've read) and it seems to me that we're getting perilously close to the point where societies break down.  One of the big signs that I've seen is that once people start dehumanizing the "other" side(s), they feel it is OK to take rights away from said groups, not understanding they are also removing those rights from themselves, and that's a road we don't want to travel down.  I fear that the results of the next election will result in a not peaceful transition/extension.

Illusions

It's so easy to fall into the pit of the virtual, be it social media or gaming.  My theory is that it is because these places give us the illusion that we're in control of them.  I think that once something loses that attribute (like facebook has for many) we are much less drawn to them.  Social media tends to give us the illusion that we are much more in control of it than we are with our real life interactions, as do many games.  So how do we go about getting that feeling of control for our real lives?  It would appear that all we need is the illusion that we're in control to make us feel better, as I know (probably better than most) that we're not in control of our social media, and mostly not in games (depending on the game).

Something to ponder on for the day: Illusions

Routines

So I've found that it's very difficult to get back into a routine after breaking it for a period of time (i.e. the end of year holidays).  I wonder if there is a good way to go about re-establishing a routine, as it seems difficult to bring yourself back into it.  I'm sure it's much easier not to break it in the first place, but sometimes environmental factors come into play that don't allow that.  Getting back into my morning workout and meditation has proven difficult this week, after not doing them for the past 2 weeks. However some parts of my routine, i.e.  feeding and taking care of animals, that weren't broken (namely because I couldn't break them) have not suffered at all in difficulty continuing to do them.  I wonder if it would be easier to resume the other portions if you tie them to the ones you continued to do.  I'll give that a try and see.

2017/12/17

After reading the "discussion" between Elon Musk and established public transportation experts my first thoughts are established industries  need outsiders to come in periodically with new ideas and disrupt things, otherwise the industry tends toward stagnation. People who are already versed in the current state have a vested interest in Keeping things how they are, on top of  peoples natural reluctance to change. The issue in this case likely will come to revolve around  government regulations however, as that's what  always happens when the government is running an industry , they regulate away competition.   We'll see if Musk has the wherewithal and  staying power to shake up another government run industry, this one with more players.

2017/12/14

So I've been using AngularJS for about 2 years now and while it is a vast improvement over using the javascript of old, the IDE's still fail to impress. I know it's due to javascript being a duck typed language but I've been waiting far too long for Something to impress me. VS Code is good, but still doesn't recognize things that are defined in other files when trying to go to definition, and for parameters you won't get anything other than "any" if you're not working with typescript. I know, duck typed, and that's what gives JS a lot of its power but man I hate not having intellisense for so many things.
On another topic, tomorrow I finish up my focus topic(?) on headspace (meditation), it will be nice to finally move on to something new, but I haven't picked out my next area yet.
My goat farming partner has brought me 6 more goats over the last 3 days, herd size is now 18. I'll be working this weekend to get more yard fenced in and hoping the guy that will be clearing another acre for us will be able to do it before next month. I also need to set up a catch pen so I don't have to chase them to give them shots.

2017/12/13

So today I'm writing on politics, hopefully in an area not too controversial. There is an idea/app that I saw mentioned some years ago and have re-visited recently, democracyOS. I find this more interesting from a policy perspective than I do from a technological one, for this reason: the ratio of congressional representatives to the constituents they represent has become far out of balance from its original value. I think the original ratio was 30,000 to 1, and it has now grown to approach 1,000,000 to 1. That means each individual is getting 30 x less representation. Is it any wonder why congress only listens to the most vocal? I appreciate what the difficulties of organizing 30 x more congressional representatives, and managing that number of people would have been untenable even in the recent past, but we could change this with the technology available today. There is really no need for representatives to physically gather in D.C. Keep then home and available to the people they represent. I don't think managing 10,000 people voting on things is really that big a deal now.

Musings on writing

so I've read numerous times in the past couple of weeks on topics along the lines of in order to get good at something, do it a lot so here I am Writing. My topics will be many and varied, as I have lots of interests, from goat farming to electromagnetic rail launches for satellites, AI and Machine learning to hapkido and meditation, politics to religion (2 of my favorites at parties).

Today I think I'll write, a bit about two AI./ Machine /Deep learning courses I'm Taking from coursera.org. These are interesting so far, one feels a bit light on algorithms, but has said it will get more in depth later. What I find vexing is that what they all seem to be using is the same couple of ideas, neither of which Could be Called new. One is back propagation in order for these algorithms to be (somewhat) self learning, and the other is that gradient descent, or some variant of such, is used to find optimal equations for the data. I'm not a mathematician by any stretch , but I wonder if there are it other, better ways to fit the data. I wonder if quantum computing algorithms would make these processes foster, it would Seem applicable at fist glance with my limited knowledge of QC on the other Concern, back prop being the current backbone of AI, I can't think of an other Method of automated  feed back Maybe using another algorithm to Complement, A kind of Automated supervised learning to handle tweaking the meta parameters used in the process.

Well, that's  it for this time, forgive any horrendous typos as I'm writing this On my surface Pro and will be using the writing to text feature ☺

Judging by this I will definitely need to work on my handwriting or just type.

Dying is easy

We all do it.   Why do we see the sacrifice that Jesus made as such a difficult choice?  Why raise up as heroes those that die to save others?  We are all going to die, it's just a question of when and how.  Wouldn't you give your life to save your children?   I know I would, without hesitation.  And I would for any child I could save.   With adults the decision becomes more difficult, at least for me: would you give up your life for a stranger?   Someone you don't even like?   It is still an easy choice when you talk about groups of people, again, at least for me.

Wouldn't 90+%(?) of people sacrifice themselves to save all of mankind?   I think a much harder moral question is one raised in the movie Swordfish; who would or could you kill in order to save another person/group of people?  Would you kill 1 to save 1000?  Kill one to save 100? 10?  You can make this arbitrarily difficult,  but the ultimate question is the same: if you kill some to save many is that more moral than allowing the many to die, but not by your hand, and what if you can't guarantee that if you didn't kill the one, then the X would die?

Daily positive

We're researching Azure private cloud at work and I've been doing the work getting it running.  It's been pretty smooth so far and will be very cool once it's running.

Daily positive

Had some spicy chipotle ramen noodles, my first for two weeks.  Going to miss the spicy noodles, will have to find something else to put chipotle on, I'm starting slow carb diet.

Daily Positive

Got all the T-Posts I need to finish fencing in the back yard, should be able to get them all in by the end of this week.  Once that's done I'll see how time consuming putting the fencing up is.   Also got pieces for a new downspout for gutters, may need to get some tin snips though.

Daily positive experience

Had a successful sleepover for the three youngest girls last night.  Had 2 activities for them, the got to make their own pizza for dinner and in the morning they decorated gingerbread trains.  Had 10 girls in total.

2013-02-07

Plan revised

Ok, so I had issues with my timer alarms not going off Sunday night, and Monday just didn't work.  Here's what I have from Tuesday night til now.  I'll be ok with making it on schedule until Thursday night, but I'd really like to make it to Friday night.  Also, caffeine is really bad for the naps.  I think it's ok right after waking up, but I don't want to do anything after that.

Progress

So, I think I've got 2 days on the schedule going, next step is to shoot for 3.  Going to try to keep on it until 10pm Tuesday night.  I think increasing one day at a time is the way to do this gradually, we'll see.