8/1 – 8/7
revisited monty hall conundrum. took seven years to understand switching advantageous bc probability of “not a car” behind “your door” = 2/3 = probability of “yes a car” behind “not your door.”
behind the scenes below:
a set of all sets? too meta. a collection of all sets? beta.
advocate having critics of simone biles compete against olympians in every event to provide scale.
and next we have gary from des moines attempting the 50m freestyle. gary works at best buy and loves his wiener dog dixie. back to you in the booth, ken.
important to revel in human achievement from time to time..
(1) athing of beauty
8/8 – 8/14
spent a day with burgeoning botanists. griped about greg grippo in traffic. juli settled into new cali town home post u-haul, truck-fall, i-bawl fiasco. soon to join sanj in the mph club.
shot the shit until our stomachs grumbled. debated dining out vs doordash. remembered we were millennials. floored accelerator to beat delivery boy home. polished off noodles and tofu, chessman style.
reclined. reconvened.
dc moderates are just conservatives trying to get laid.
do you get end-of-world anxiety?
imagine how they felt after hiroshima.
tattoo “sad bitchez” on our foreheads.
read the little book of scientific principles, theories and things.
the great greek philosopher aristotle rejected democritus’ idea of the atom and said that the matter was completely uniform and continuous. the influence of aristotle was extraordinary. his concept of matter was basically wrong but accepted for some twenty centuries until replaced by dalton’s atomic theory.
hippocrates. primus ex omnibus memoria dignis.
leibniz dreamed of creating a universal symbolic language which could be used for determining the truth of any proposition. this dream gave birth to modern mathematical logic.
galvani expounded the theory that the muscles of frogs were the source of electricity. for many years, a number of scientists performed experiments on the legs of frogs without caring for the displeasure of gourmets and thus created an artificial shortage of frogs.
faraday’s laboratory assistant was an old ex-soldier, sergeant anderson, whose chief virtue was blind obedience. one evening, faraday forgot to dismiss anderson and found him still at work the next morning.
kirchhoff’s banker was not impressed with his ability to find elements in the sun. “what use is gold in the sun if it can’t be brought to earth?” he asked. when kirchhoff was awarded gold sovereigns for his work, he deposited them with his banker and said: “here is gold from the sun.”
“toast does indeed have a tendency to land butter side down.” robert matthews explained his argument with mathematical calculations that took five pages. it seems nature abhors a newly vacuumed floor.
8/15 – 8/21
watched the wheels completely come off. a retreat from geopolitics impossible.
parallels with vietnam questionable. al-qaeda a foreign import. vietcong never set foot on american soil. true in both cases that american forces committed to a government so enriched and bankrupt that its own people disavowed it.
believe afghanistan our last human sacrifice to the nixon doctrine of war on drugs. effectively told afghanis, “your saviors are here, now if you will just stand still while we burn your cash crop.“
washington’s massive military juggernaut has been stopped in its steel tracks by a small pink flower – the opium poppy.
every spring, the opium harvest fills the taliban’s coffers once again, funding wages for a new crop of guerrilla fighters.
in one of history’s bitter ironies, afghanistan’s unique ecology converged with american military technology to transform this remote, landlocked nation into the world’s first true narco-state.
watched i am not your negro (2020). visual essay of james baldwin’s unfinished one.
it was on that bright afternoon that I knew I was leaving france. i could simply no longer sit around paris, discussing the algerian and the black american problem. everybody else was paying their dues. it was time I went home and paid mine.
i was older than medgar, malcolm and martin. i was raised to believe that the eldest was supposed to be a model for the younger, and was, of course, expected to die first. not one of these three lived to be forty.
i have always been struck, in america, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep that virtually no american appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life.
when sidney [poitier] jumps off the train, the white liberal people downtown were much relieved and joyful. but when black people saw him jump off the train, they yelled, “get back on the train, you fool!” the black man jumps off the train in order to reassure white people, to make them know that they are not hated, that though they have made human errors, they done nothing for which to be hated.
i can’t be a pessimist, because I’m alive. to be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so i’m forced to be an optimist.
8/22 – 8/31
went back to school. requested fewer hours at work. robert facepalmed, chuckled.
you could have asked sooner.
i’m a little slow on the uptake.
does jimmy fallon laugh in all the wrong places lest he suspects himself of not having a good time?
read..
(1) the people of the air by pedram khosronejad. jinns and zars > genies and jafars.
christiaan snouck hurgronje argues that zar is not an arabic word per se but originally came from eastern arabia, somewhere in the province of oman. strangely he goes on to say that he has been told that the word is arabic and denotes a sinister ‘visitor’ (zara yezuru) who makes his or her abode and so possesses the victim.
most literature on spirit possession assumes that it affects women more than men, for women are less free, more disenfranchised and more in need of a proxy.
in reply to the question of what zar, nuban and mashayikh define, the local people answer: all of these are winds (bad).
black people and poor people are in first line of attack of the winds. fishermen, seamen (jashu) and women who work in palm-groves are in the second. the person who becomes the target of the winds is named markab, a mount, or faras, a horse, while the wind which is on a mount (patient/victim) is called hablub.
to escape from the pain and torture of a wind, targets should go directly to the baba or mama of that specific wind who inherit their profession and responsibility from their parents; most of them are either black or mixed race and are dark skinned.
iranian exorcismsDownload(2) the immortals by martin amis
one one occasion – when there was nobody around – i teased out a lone handjob for an entire summer
i sat through geology, waiting for biology. i used to croon over those little warm ponds where space-seeded life began. yes, i was there, cheering you on from the touchline.
if i thought the permian age was the pits it was only because i hadn’t yet lived through the triassic.
apocalypse happened in the year A.D. 2045. when i was sure it was coming, i headed straight for the action: tokyo.
i was like the passenger on the crippled airplane, with the the duty free upended over my mouth, trying to find the state where nothing matters. this was how the whole world seemed to be behaving. and you cannot find this state. because it doesn’t exist. because things do matter. even here.
kartika upadhyaya
Kartika Upadhyaya 