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無限旅程 3

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The mind which has become accustomed to the freedom and impartiality of philosophic contemplation will preserve something of the same freedom and impartiality in the world of action and emotion. It will view its purposes and desires as parts of the whole, with the absence of insistence that results from seeing them as infinitesimal fragments in a world of which all the rest is unaffected by any one man’s deeds. The impartiality which, in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth, is the very same quality of mind which, in action, is justice, and in emotion is that universal love which can be given to all, and not only to those who are judged useful or admirable. Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship of the universe consists man’s true freedom, and his liberation from the thraldom of narrow hopes and fears.

Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

— Bertrand Russell: The Value of Philosophy

— Chapter XV of The Problems of Philosophy

永恆感覺

無限旅程

— Me@2012-03-26 10:18:27 AM

2012.03.26 Monday ACHK

Time horizon

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Bezos: It does fit into my view. Our first shareholder letter, in 1997, was entitled, “It’s all about the long term.” If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

In some cases, things are inevitable. The hard part is that you don’t know how long it might take, but you know it will happen if you’re patient enough. Ebooks had to happen. Infrastructure web services had to happen. So you can do these things with conviction if you are long-term-oriented and patient.

— Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think

— By Steven Levy
   
— Wired December 2011

2012.03.06 Tuesday ACHK

Single-world interpretation, 6.5

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If this is the case, then wave function is deterministic. There is no free will. The free will is due to the ongoing superposition of eigenstates. Locally, we see superposition of “a and b” collapse to (such as) a. Globally, we also see b “goes to” the environment. Nothing is lost in a sense that no information is lost.

Then what happens when you make a choice by collapsing a wave function?

Free will, like wave function collapse, is a local illusion.

Since information cannot be lost, we always exist.

— Me@2011.11.20

2012.02.25 Saturday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

Single-world interpretation, 6.2

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In the Many-worlds interpretation (MWI), when we say that “a + b” collapses to “a”, there is a shift of definition of “you”.

MWI is in one sense correct: choice b version of you still exists. But the trick is that he is not in another universe. He is in the environment of this universe.

And perhaps in reverse, you are also part of the environment of him.

— Me@2011.11.20

2012.02.22 Wednesday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

Process, not a state, 4

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Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

— Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) Greek Philosopher

* Source: Will Durant, _The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers_ (1926) [Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, 1991, ISBN 0-671-73916-6] Ch. II: Aristotle and Greek Science; part VII: Ethics and the Nature of Happiness:
   
    “Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; ‘these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions’; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: ‘the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life… for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy‘” (p. 76).
   
    The quoted phrases within the quotation are from the Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 4; Book I, 7. The misattribution is from taking Durant’s summation of Aristotle’s ideas as being the words of Aristotle himself.
   
— Wikiquote

Excellence is a process, not a state, nor an event.

An event is a change of state. A process is an infinite chain of events.

— Me@2011.01.01

— Me@2012.02.04

2012.02.04 Saturday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

Single-world interpretation, 5

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Wave function collapse is a process of losing the superposition information to the environment.

— Me@2011.11.20

The unchosen choices are lost to the environment.

— Me@2011.11.21

Nature never forgets about any correlations: …

— Lubos Motl

The alternative “universes” are in this universe’s environment.  

— Me@2012.01.27

2012.01.28 Saturday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

Cloud Foundry

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Whatever the fate of the project, it shows where the enterprise software world is going. The world has evolved from Microsoft’s desktop OS to sweeping web services like Google, and now these two are coming together in a new type of operating system for running not mere desktops or individual servers but armies of servers and even multiple data centers.

— Man Survives Steve Ballmer’s Flying Chair To Build ’21st Century Linux’

— Cade Metz

2012.01.19 Thursday ACHK

Publish! 9

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Keep a diary, and someday it’ll keep you.

— Mae West

生前，你的作品是你的附屬品；

死後，你是你的作品的附屬品。

— Me@2011.12.20

2011.12.23 Friday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK