Tariq's Tumble

Jun 01

DC Lives and Breathes: notime4yourshit: Currently watching Chuck Brown’s homegoing.As with... -

notime4yourshit:

Currently watching Chuck Brown’s homegoing.

As with Michael and Whitney, there’s much to be said about the amazing way, we send someone off that we consider ours, when they cross into the next realm. Even after the fair amount of publicity following the announcement of…

May 22

[video]

[video]

May 05

This is my face when Professor McCall asks me to model a core idea of stoic philosophy at a recent Stanford Alumni lecture at the Greek Embassy.

“They too [Zeno and Chrysippus] affirmed that everything is fated, with the following model: When a dog is tied to a cart, if it wants to follow it is pulled and follows, making its spontaneous act coincide with necessity, but if it does not want to follow it will be compelled in any case. So it is with men too: even if they do not want to, they will be compelled in any case to follow what is destined.”

#still #learning #at #stanford

Apr 05

aberrantbeauty:

Jorge Maia

I’ve always been moved by the beauty that sometimes emerges in decay, abandon.

(via powderdays)

Mar 28

“

Today’s young accept this with little demur. Like every generation of students, they protest: but their demonstrations against tuition fees are barely serious. In 1968 we marched to change the world, and shook the self-confidence of the political elite. But when this failed to change the world, my contemporaries changed their clothes and took jobs in investment banks. Then they presided over, and benefited from, the longest bull market in securities in history.

Young people might reasonably ask their parents or grandparents why a much richer society cannot now provide the benefits it provided for an earlier generation. I am not sure I have a good answer.

Mar 22

“How will you be known? Some
registered complaints. You passed them
in the hallway, their new haircuts.
The bosses are known by new wars.
What salmon are left hurry upstream—
cold swaths in the bay. Linnets, by
rose fire at the edges—(linnet or finch?
the word edge has wings made of “e”);
the moon rests in a mantle
of minutes, its boundaries in back
of the trees. Boundaries
are known by their nothings—;
you will be known by your dreams.” —

Brenda Hillman, After a Very Long Difficult Day

I needed this poem today.

Mar 08

“That’s where the good and evil imagination is at play. Most of these technologies are neutral in themselves; it’s the way in which they are used that goes one way or the other, and that is dependent on our imagination. Going back to the Hebraic imagination, something that I think is very important about the biblical story—and I’m taking this philosophically here, as a story on par with many of the Greek stories, and not making a truth claim for it as sacred Revelation—is that much like the story of Prometheus, it is a story about imagination and how it works in terms of good and evil. I have always found a certain Talmudic reading of Genesis (developed by Eric Fromm and others) fascinating: six days of creation and then leaving the seventh day empty as a sabbatical space for humans to cocreate with God, with the good, and with the Torah (a word which means “direction” or “way”). God leaves that day free so that we might cocreate or not, so that we might keep or break with the covenant. The seventh day is an invitation to complete creation. This is a refusal of theodicy. The seventh day is left for humans to complete and therefore to direct creation in an evil or a good direction. A good direction is imagination responding to the call of the other, whereas an evil direction is an imagination that has closed itself off from alterity, strangeness, transcendence, foreignness, surprise.” — Richard Kearney (via azspot)

(via azspot)

Jan 10

thepiquant:

Dissecting an Argument

Jan 07

“[T]echnology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.” — Vint Cerf (via azspot)

(via azspot)

“Your competition is not other people but the time you kill, the ill-will you create, the knowledge you neglect to learn, the connections you fail to build, the health you sacrifice along the path, your inability to generate ideas, the people around you who don’t support and love your efforts, and whatever god you curse for your bad luck. Avoid those and you avoid competition.” — JAMES ALTUCHER, How to Eat What You Kill

Dec 30

ericstriffler:

jillstrif:

thedailywhat:

Literal New Year’s Eve Party Promotion of the Day: Well, if everyone’s going…

[braiker / frangry.]

YES

AND TAKES NO REQUESTS HAHAHA

(Source: cthulhucore, via ericstriffler)

Dec 23

When years from now I remember this sparsely lettered time when I didn’t make time for whole books, when I only read poetry for pleasure, and only two poets at that, that it was the biggest, most meaningful commitment I could keep in the the monsoon of my early adulthood.

Dec 13

Dear OKCupid,

Yours is a brilliantly conceived and well executed product. That said, there is a dynamic on OKCupid that makes it unlikely that serious, eligible people will engage each other successfully, whether for the purposes of a romantic relationship or something more casual…

Some high percentage of messages sent through your site are discourteous, offensive or generally low quality and minimal effort. This is especially and emphatically true of messages from men to women.

As a result, (1) women’s inboxes fill up quickly and they are overwhelmed by the number of low quality messages, eventually causing them to become disgusted and leave the site, and (2) thoughtful messages from genuine, courteous guys get lost in a sea of asshole mail, causing them to become frustrated and leave the site.

The ability to block/report offensive users doesn’t help much because disengagement and attrition among women will begin after only a couple of bad messages and they won’t take the time to report the rest. It’s time for a systemic reset.

This problem could be solved elegantly by creating a “courtesy economy” where courteous, high-quality messages earn you the right to send more messages.

The key mechanism of this economy is a feature whereby users can assign a quality score to each message they receive (perhaps composed of two or more message dimensions e.g. courtesy and effort). It should be clear that these ratings have nothing to do with whether the recipient is actually interested in the sender.

The cumulative “courtesy” score achieved by each user should dictate how many people they can message. E.g. If over the course of a month, a certain user’s message quality is rated as 1/5 (based on at least ten messages), they can only send messages to ten new contacts in the next month. If it is 5/5, they can send messages to fifty new contacts in the next month.

This would have the dual effect of drastically cutting down on messages across the board such that message volumes are more manageable for users, and increasing the quality and choosiness of messages (given a limited supply of messages, people will only message people they are really interested in) so as to improve the likelihood of a successful match.

Just a thought,
Tariq

p.s. Also, get rid of the ‘wink’ feature, it’s creepy and nobody likes it.

Dec 12

You Say You Want a Devolution? -

Really interesting read on cultural stagnation in the US. Perhaps the most compelling observation is that style companies today have a bizarre set of incentives. On the one hand they must produce constant novelty to drive consumption and growth. On the other, they must keep things predictable and constant enough that they don’t have to deal with fundamental re-invention and the risk of becoming suddenly and dramatically irrelevant.