Deep down, my mind seems to believe that true reality is continuous and discrete ontologies are just fake plastic toys we come up with because they’re sometimes easy to think about

And this has, unconsciously, influenced my choice of focus in physics/math stuff – even though it seems like a very suspect assumption, and even though it ultimately stems from a non-rational feeling that, like, we humans should be ~too sinful~ to grasp true reality and thus it can’t involve discrete elements, since a sufficiently small set of discrete elements can “fit in the human mind all at once with nothing left out”

(and even a structure that is too large to grasp can be divided into such pieces)

sapphoshands:

tranxio:

Yesterday I learned that “sneeze” was, in Middle English, spelled “fnese” (with an actual F, not a long S), and the “fne-” part is cognate with the “pneu-” in Greek “pneuma,” breath.

i fnesed soda out my nose reading this

(via sapphorb)

I have been feeling sad in the evenings a lot this winter, and it’s been especially bad the last few nights – a bad mood will come on suddenly, sometime in the evening, and I’ll spend the rest of the evening trying unsuccessfully to think of ways to fix or salve it.  My best guess is that this is something like SAD, since it’s close to the winter solstice, and the bad moods have a 24-hour periodicity.

Usually I’ve noticed the bad mood coming on at maybe 6 or 7 PM, but today I started to feel kinda bad around 4.  I noticed that the sun happened to be setting outside, and that f.lux had just started to make the colors on my computer more orange.

So I turned f.lux off and closed the blinds, and now I don’t feel sad.

Could be placebo or coincidence, but it’s an interesting angle on the problem.  I completely forget i have f.lux most of the time, but given how much I use my computer, it’s having a big impact on the kind of light I am exposed to.

And it’s deliberately synching up that light with the light outside, so if the light outside is making me depressed, well … that seems obviously bad.

I know a lot of people have f.lux installed, and people generally talk about it like it’s an unalloyed good, so I thought I would post about to encourage others to think about whether f.lux might be screwing with them.

(I’d expect there to be multiple patterns here – people who get depressed in winter because their circadian rhythms get delayed may benefit from f.lux since it stops the computer from advancing their phase when used at night, but if some people who get depressed in the winter due to an overall decrease in blue light exposure, f.lux will only make that worse.)

that screed in the middle of the islam book review about orientalism and eurocentrism being nonsensical concepts, possibly made up by cultural marxists who “are universal liars about the past”, and european society just being objectively the most superior and important, didn’t strike me as very even-handed…

Yeah, it’s rare for him to spend an entire review with his brain turned on.  I just meant that the review engaged with Islamic history seriously in a way the other review did not engage with American history seriously.  He has probably engaged with American history seriously elsewhere, no doubt interlaced with Ben-Garrison-cartoon-level engagements with some other thing, and so on.