Bits and Paradoxes #31
Mirror Girl!
Hi,
How's your existential crisis going on?
Another week, yet another letter. Took a break from work early today just to write this letter. I feel procrastination is taking control over the newsletter. Also, I haven’t edited this letter much because of boredom and vague anxieties… :/
I have no idea how I am phasing in and out daily, staring into the abyss! Nights and days don't have anything to offer. Thoughts about grad schools are getting stronger…
There's nothing much interesting this time, except for one thing: I put out my 2nd short sci-fi story (video) Mirror Girl. I had written the first draft back in September 2020. However, the idea has its root way back in mid- 2020 when I wrote the first story-line for Raaodsn X-phi | A Space Journey.
Mirror Girl | A short sci-fi story
It’s a journal from an alien species known as "The Watcher" where he encounters a mysterious girl.
I had been meaning to narrate this since last month when I told Bijay about it — an [[Idea Debt]] I guess. So then I started planning… But…
A big "BUT". My microphone sucks. I did three iterations of the complete recording. Every time I sat down for the post-processing, I'd hear background noises, especially the barking of the neighbour's dog. :/
I had to wait patiently for certain chunks of the days to record my audio without the dogs getting in my way. Still, the mic's internal noise persisted. So I decided to shift the pitch of the voice to mitigate those noises. It turned out to be weirdly "good", an alienated voice. Sometimes, some improvisations are worth having. Haha.
Do watch the video. I spent an absurd amount of time post-processing the video. Playing with color, brightness, contrast, and transitions. Exporting the voices from audacity to shotcut and inserting them meticulously to the video timeline.
I did the whole video-exploration-editing in one sitting, hours of staring at the abyss.
Oh! Also, don't forget to turn on the subtitles for a better experience. :)
Other than that, this time I have a few things to share:
a self-contemplative essay from James Somers regarding teaching and learning
an essay by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder talking about the spans of life using an oak tree
a profound talk by [[Guillaume Nery]] on free-diving and the liberating (spiritual) feeling of “self”
I am just dumping my notes and raw thoughts. These are all inspiring for me. I hope you find them inspiring too…
#Reading
I should have loved biology
James Somers | 17 min
This is an inspiring read where James talks about our education system's inability to make students curious. The existing system (most of) makes the whole teaching-learning process ridiculously mundane, where students have to rote-learn textbooks without any intuitions.
This he explains from the perspective of the Biology course which he wishes could have been taught in an interesting way…
How come we memorized chemical formulas but didn’t talk about that? It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, that I came to understand cells as recursively self-modifying programs
In biology class, biology wasn’t presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing. We were nowhere acquainted with real biologists, the real questions they had, the real experiments they did to answer them. We were just given their conclusions.
It stirred up a few sedimentary thoughts:
(a) A good" medium is required to effectively teach abstract concepts.
This can be through more interactive teaching methods like visualizations, simulation, real-world applications, and the likes.
This connects to a few things I get back to frequently. I highly recommend reading/listening/watching them:
[[Stop Drawing Dead Fish]] metaphor by [[Bret Victor]]
a profound essay [[How can we develop transformative tools for thought?]] by [[Andy Matuschak]] and [[Michael Nielsen]]
(b) Teachers shape our motivation.
A teacher should not only just "teach" but also inspire.
Paul Lockhart’s [[A Mathematician’s Lament]] touches upon school robbing students of the questions about life, universe, and everything. It also questions about what should be taught in schools: teach only what’s required or from ground-up?
I had touched this as a fragment in Bits-and-Paradoxes: 18 too.
I am sure most of you also feel this way, how schools/colleges, especially here in Nepal, are mostly about textbooks and how they encourage hacking the system towards higher grades without giving a damn about exploration and intuition.
Time to a Pin Oak
Written by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder | Artwork by Katie Holten
I recently discovered the Emergence Magazine, and this is the first essay I read there; one of the most beautiful things I've read this year.
This was beautiful not only due to the interactive-immersive style but also how it presents the life of an oak tree in synchronous with that of the whole universe.
Although time -- seconds, minutes, hours, months, years -- is our own construct, there are things in nature that tell a great story of life. This essay resonates with that by telling the story from the growth of an oak tree; how a miniature, “unremarkable” seed (acorn) grows to be a beautiful giant that lives up to more than a century. Seasons pass by. Leaves fall off and grow back. People come and go.
The pin oak has dropped its leaves through eighty-seven winters and has regrown them every spring. It stands there in the park, season after season, patiently wrapping layers of time around its trunk.
The universe is expanding: 13.8 billion years ago, from a point smaller than an atom, came a great explosion which generated space and time and—over billions of years—everything that exists today in the cosmos. Spacetime was born among the laws of the universe. Einstein’s theory of relativity states that the speed of light is constant; time is relative. If we were to approach 186,000 miles per second, time would slow down. For our physical bodies, the spacetime continuum functions far outside of our immediate sensory awareness.
I don’t begin to understand all of this. When it comes to time, I am caught between a constructed reality and a nearly unfathomable one. I can’t see the birth of the universe when I look up at the stars. I don’t understand that we orbit the sun when I feel it rising against my back. So I look for the universe in this tree. I want to see 13.8 billion years mapped out across eighty-seven rings. I want to scrape away the bark or stare into the shifting leaves and encounter the mystery of the beginning of the universe, of the life contained in an acorn.
Beautiful. :)
#Watching
The Exhilarating Peace of Freediving
TED Talk | 19 min
This is so beautiful, one of the profound talks I have ever listened to. Calling it "talk" is undervaluing the wisdom from [[Guillaume Nery]]. He talks about how liberating free-diving is, how it gives you a profound sense of "self"; [[Pale Blue Dot]], a dot suspended in the vast blueness…
"..if one day you try to stop breathing, you stop thinking too... It calms your mind. Today, in the 21st century we're under so much pressure, our minds are overworked. We think at a million miles an hour. We're always stressed. Being able to free dive lets you, just for a moment, relax your mind. Holding your breath underwater means giving yourself the chance to experience weightlessness. It means underwater, floating...with your body completely relaxed, letting go of all your tension. This is our plight in the 21st century: our backs hurt, our necks hurt, everything hurts...because we're stressed and tensed all the time. But when you're in water, you let yourself float as if you were in space. You let yourself go completely. It's an extraordinary feeling. You can finally get in touch with your body, mind, and spirit. Everything feels better, all at once..."
I had first encountered Guillaume Nery through his One Breath Around The World video.
When I Was Done Dying
This music...animation...art.... I've been listening/watching it every night.
I am speechless…gave me goosebumps…So beautiful!
Thanks Bijay for sharing!
I can't describe in words the emotions this evoked... I almost cried the first time I watched it, staring at what I saw...
This reminded me of two videos:
Oh! Also watching Dan Deacon perform it live makes you appreciate his art more.
When I was done dying, my conscience regained
So I began my struggle, a nothingness strained
Out a flash made of time, my new form blasted out
And it startled me so and I burst out a shout
At which my legs ran frantic like birds from a nest
And I ran until drained, leaving no choice but rest
So I fell asleep softly at the edge of a cave
But I should have gone in deeper but I'm not so brave
And like that I was torn out and thrown in the sky
And I said all my prayers because surely I'll die
As I crashed down and smashed into earth, into dirt
How my skin did explode, leaving only my shirt
But from shirt grew a tree and then tree grew a fruit
And I became the seed and that seed was a brute
And I clawed through the ground with my roots and my leaves
And I tore up the shirt and I ate up the sleeves
And they laughed out at me and said "what is your plan?"
But their question was foreign, I could not understand
When then suddenly I'm ripped up and placed into a mouth
And it swallowed me down at which time I head south…
…
#Listening
Clear and Boring: Cortex 106
1 hr 30 min
Here [[CGP Grey]] and [[Myke Hurley]] have casual conversations like they do in other episodes. They talk about their life and changes [[COVID-19]] has introduced. And of course, the indefiniteness of life….and a lot of introspection…
The conversation jumps from The Spaceship You to mechanical keyboards to note-taking tools to [[Baader-Meinhof Effect]].
Baader-Meinhof Effect is the feeling that once you become aware of something, you start to “notice” it everywhere in real life. (Maybe related to the Tetris Effect?).
Regarding the note-taking tools: they talk about their increasing hype and the Baader-Meinhof Effect, especially about “tools for networked thoughts” like Roam and Obsidian. They go back to one metaphor: Notion is for architects! Roam is for gardeners. Evernote is for librarians.
One broken thought I have: Has this “note-taking” and “knowledge management” space become more like a Mimetic Trap (imitation vs innovation)?
Anyway, definitely a conversation to listen to when you're bored and casually doing other things!
#Fascinating
141 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena
Motion and Time. Luminance, Color, and Contrast. Geometry. Spatial. Cognitive. Auditory.
A lot of fascinating optical illusions and explanations by Michael Bach
The starting paragraph has a question with a reply: Can illusions reveal something about my personality?
No. The web is full of claims that your personality (right- or left brain dominated, intro- vs. extroverted, stressed or not, or whatever) can be deduced from your ability to see some given illusion. However, there is no reliable scientific data that suggests this. That’s just click-baiting BS. There is some influence of age, though – but you don’t need illusions to know your age… So: Don’t let it irk you if you don’t see all the phenomena described. For many illusions, there is a percentage of people with perfectly normal vision who just don’t see them, mostly for reasons currently unknown.
#Ending-Thoughts
That's all for now.
Have your day/night.
I will listen to When I Was Done Dying for tonight to boost my existential crisis. I let it be for now. :)
Love,
Nish
epic video !