Category: Uncategorized
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Your Occasional Stoic — Be curious, but not reactive.
Does the external distract you? Give yourself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around. But then you must also avoid being carried about the other way. For those too are triflers who have tired themselves in life by their activity, and yet have no object to which to direct every…
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It Takes Time To Go Fast
For future reference: “Faster finishers (those under 10 hours 30 minutes) tend ot average greater traning volumes than slower finishers. On average, the faster men and women trained approximately 14 hours per week, broken down into 2.5 hours of swimming, 7.5 hours of cycling and 4 hours of running.” Triathlete magazine “Would You make A…
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Sensory Deprivation Tanks, Talking Dolphins, and Aliens: Remembrances of reading John C. Lilly
The Scientists: A Novel Autobiography Simulations of God: Science of Belief Programming and Metaprogramming of the Human Biocomputer John C. Lilly Lilly was a well know and respected scientist who, like many in the late sixties, kinda start going off the rails. Did young Sean read the works of science Lilly produced early in his…
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Review: The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz
The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (trans. Joscelyn Godwin) Here’s one of the problems for the autodidact who follows his bliss this way and that, from one book to another, reading what he wants. He can end up, at 18, reading one of the foundational texts of western hermeticism without any real context, or real…
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Review: Mondo2000’s Users Guide to the New Edge
Mondo2000s Users Guide to the New Edge R.U. Sirius, Rudy Rucker, Queen Mu Friends, now-a-days, it seems hopelessly naïve that the birth of the internet age would bring with it a techno utopia of virtual reality, direct democracy, and extensive leisure. But in the early 90s, to a certain set of California techno-utopians (and the…
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Literature Reveals the World: Some Quick Thoughts on Finley’s The World of Odysseus
The World of Odysseus M.I. Finley A stunning work of social history which uses what we know about the historical time period which produced the Iliad and the Odyssey to help understand these two classics. We need to remember that even to homer, the events of the Iliad and Odyssey were ancient history. His codification…
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Review: Shah’s Pandemics
Pandemic: Tracking Contagions From Cholera to Ebola and Beyond Sonia Shah I’m not really a science guy, but I have thing for pandemics. There’s something about their lethal power, and how unaffected they are by the human misery they cause, that terrifies me. When I heard the good reviews of Shah’s social history of pandemics,…
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Review: Older’s Infomocracy
Infomocracy Malka Older A science fiction political thriller novel about elections. Meaning, a book written precisely for me. In the future, elections are done on a hyper-local level with major parties looking to piece together large numbers of small districts to achieve global parties. The system is run by a disinterested google-like corporation (Information) determined…
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Bibliography: Anne Carson
I don’t always love Anne Carson’s work. Autobiography of Red is one of my favorite books of contemporary poetry (can we call it that?) but Red Doc> was too much for me. But even when I don’t like an individual work, I love what I see to be her life’s project — connecting the classical…
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Review: Hamilton’s The Second Life of Nick Mason
The Second Life of Nick Mason Steve Hamilton Another Hamilton book, this one debuting a new series and a new brooding protagonist – Nick Mason: noble petty criminal forced to work for evil organized crime boss while valiantly attempting to hold onto his humanity and save from ruin a whole bunch of innocent people. This…
Milo and the Calf 