Blog Moved

Hi Everyone,

I've switched over to the wordpress side. You can find me new blog at: wordworldwhirlwind.wordpress.com

Too Short to Slam, Too Long to Save for Later

Sometimes I swear I can feel my soul smiling

Strings across my ribcage like a pearl necklace

I’m not quite sure why I’d wear a pearl necklace

But the soul wants what the soul wants

And it string across my ribcage like a pearl necklace

A perfect parabola of compressed content

Compressing doubts and anxieties

Until they liquefy, drip, then waterfall

Leaving my soul 75% lighter
Light enough to smile.

To be clear: this is not the laughter of the soul

There is no expansive, proselytizing joy

There is no agape.

This is the absence of worry.

This is ukulele and kazoo music indoors, with a view of a sunny, 45 degree day outside.

This is my soul smiling.

Iam's

This one needs a bit more editing, but I'll throw it up there for comments/viewing.

If I wanted to be an entrepreneur

The only innovation I could offer

Would be ways to sell myself

Now I am happy

Now I am relaxed

Now I am bold

Now, I am tired of the iambs

So I would shout every trochee

If messages could actually escape me

If the sound waves could reach civilization, or nature,

Or anything outside of this Alcatraz island on which I self-wreck

I am conceptually confined

Within a prison built of bars

Of Self-hymns and self-hate

Where substantial thought

Is necessarily always worn away by the incessant brain waves

Of self-absorption, until only grated, scorching fragments

Stand under my feet

If only I could launch out to sea

For Blind Homer could see that

Helen had a face to launch a thousand ships

But I only have the hell in facing my own immobility

For I am still-sick, but I long to be motion-sick.

Long gone from this island

Where my speed of departure can only be measured

In knots that untangle in my gut

And from around the sinusoidal grip on my psyche

And so I would barter all my iam words and thoughts

To be an immigrant on a strange ship

Underneath a single Constellation that could guide me to a foreign land

Or even a whole new galaxy

Because recently self has been the only universal

In my universe of a sucking black hole

So there is no dimension

Or rather life is only 1-Dimmensional, I-Dimmensional,

But life is so much fuller

I trust

And I still remember

Therefore Give me but one frontier, the first frontier

From tears, from smiles, from here, from there

But not from me, not from I am

Give me the royal we,

Or just you

Or just he

I long for the tempest

Or Climate change

Sink this Altcataz island

And let me see if I can float.

Or if you could, build me a railway out of this prison

Strap me to a locomative and call me conductor

So it is physically possible for me to once again

soak back up external energy from

Faith

Altruism

Biology

PINEAPPLE

Next time we speak

I hope we speak of unthinkably mundane

As long as it’s not stuck in the mud of this muck

Cuz, as you’ve seen, I’m stranded by habitual choice

And am starting to go selfishly insane.

New Year's Resolution Number 11

New Year’s Resolution Number 11

Swagger

Is Mental Tickling

It is playful, mock aggression

necessarily directed at others

But please do not be alarmed

If you proceed to L.O.L. throughout the duration

Of this poem

It simply means your mentally ticklish

Yeah I’m about to swagercize all over this room

Like I had red kicks with springs at my soul

Jumping out to you

With a track jacket

That had my last name and your new favorite number on the back

That’d be my phone number

Yeahhh, I’m about to swagger

Like I was walking into a party

And pointing so much

You thought I was choreographing a scatter plot

Yeahh, I’m about to swagger so large

You’ll need a satellite that has an orbital

Going through at least 14 zodiac signs just to capture the

Full picture

Yeah, I’m about to swagger so hard

The ground might break like tension

Yeah I’m about to swagger

But first,

Maybe I should check what I’m swaggering about

Because this nagging voice I know better than most of my fb friends

Keeps asking me if I’m a confident man

Or just a con man

Because confidence is a self-congratulatory hi-five routine

It is the songs you sing in the shower

The glow that sticks when the name-drops are cropped,

The hi-fives do stop, the flirting just flops, the grades straight up drop

It is solace but also solitude.

Look, I enjoy the show of swag just as much as Kanye

And if I’m chilling at a party

I’ll rock a pair of glasses made of plastic

Whose only apparent purpose is to show

That your vision is so good

That you can still see with plastic bars

Imprisoning your forward view

But I want to know when the show’s over

And everyone’s gone somewhere

That I can slip those glasses off

And still see my grin in a reflective material or state

See, confidence might be what you’ve done, who you are

Your objectives in a relativist world

It is certainly the rare smile put on when you are by yourself

Not imagining you are in the company of others.

Cognizant of your isolation

And still smiling.

Please do not take this to mean that confidence is selfish.

It simply requires no recognition.

New Year’s Resolution Number 11: Solidify confidence

New Year’s Resolution Number 12: Establish Swagger.

Update!

What up!

It's been a long time. Hopefully, I'll be able to post more regularly in the near future, but for tonight I just wanted to post the script for a couple of new poems I've penned this year. Hopefully I can get some video up soon as well.

Best Wishes,
DKSays

Final Final

All Right Po-Pho Final. It's just you and me. Time to dance (so to speak). The fact that I am talking to you anthropormorphically suggests you have some things going for you--like my lack of sleep. On the other hand, I am still sentient enough to use the word antorpormorphically (possibly even spelling it correctly) and I have used my time wisely and edifying-ly. It all comes down to this. It's like the final battle in Harry Pot...EXPELLIAMUS!

Objectives Subjectivity

Subjective perception is a deep part of reality. Something that makes life richer. But this one. This general anxiety. This just fits in as something to be rid of for the sake of other goals.

Observations

1. Flying Jet-Blue back to California, the airline forced us to watch a clip of Taylor Swift wishing Jet-Blue a 'happy birthday' and then to watch her music video for "Mine." It was, for me, a rare encounter with benevolent dictatorship.
2. Gatorade-purple-sun-set that colors the world, the ground, the bench, majestic.
3. In California, even when weather.com swears there will be a storm---it's still 60 degrees and sunny.
4. Were John Mill alive today, I'm guessing he would be a Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist (reference: "On Liberty," particularly his thoughts on the nature of genius). Which would make us practically neighbors. Fifty-fifty chance we'd be fbf's (facebook friends forever).
5. This is my second post in a row that uses a list. That's some meta-BOL(D)ic information for you to digest.

Pillows

Things I Leaned About Pillows This Weekend

1. They make traveling much more restful.
2. Pillow-soft abs. They can absorb a punch or two.
3. No better way to avoid looking like a tourist than to carry a pillow around with you. You feel at home around the whole city!
4. I am undefeated in unilateral pillow fights.
5. This post is completely metaphorical and incredibly deep. You missed that!?

Optimism

Well Hello, Hello! So it's been a long time, and while I can't pretend I've spent the entire hiatus ruminating deeply, I have thought and developed several opinions that might be interesting to post as blog posts--so I will try to have a long series of blog posts that I pen (type?) in the next weeks.

But, for the topic at hand, a clash of isms. Specifically, optimism and pessimism. So as some of you might know, I'm a very optimistic person. I don't mean that superficially. I'm that type of optimistic person who just. won't. stop. I'm an in-your-face optimist. You tell me you had a bad day, I'll think (if not say outloud) that you had a learning experience. I'll lose twenty dollars, and think that it is probably stimulating the economy. Hell, the Yankees will lose and I figure it will make them hungrier in the next series of games. Yeah, I'm that kind of optimist. In fact, I don't know if there is anyone more optimistic than I am. But being an optimist, I figure there probably is a whole lot of people just as optimistic as I am.

I've always been a fairly optimistic person--as I posted earlier in the "About Me" post with 20 facts about me, I don't remember the last time a song or a night's sleep didn't make things better. But things have gotten to a whole new level of optimism recently. It might have to due with my developing and strengthening "grassroots philosophy" view of the nature of life--in which individuals are largely free to define what has meaning in life. Equipped with such power, it is easy enough to assume that you are largely free to determine whether a given situation is happy or sad. I am not so arrogant or naive to think that my happiness and optimism is fully controllable by me and my thinking (I know biology and chemistry shaped by evolutionary processes greatly shape and limit the ability of my thinking--and I also know I don't have the faintest idea in exactly way the hard sciences do that), however, on a value-level, and thus for all intents and purposes for my conscious thinking, I've begun to think that life is life, situations are situations, and it is largely in my power to decide whether I will be optimistic or pessimistic regarding those situations and my life--and I nearly always choose optimism.

It has gotten to the point recently, however, where hearing pessimism frustrates me, angers me. Why don't people realize they can just be optimistic!? Today, I think I've realized the necessity of pessimism, and hope to be a more reasonable and tolerant optimist in the future.

See just as much as my "philosophy," has strengthened my optimism, I know the fortunate circumstances of my life, in which I have faced relatively very few hardships and tragedies, has insulated and fortified my optimism. But while I have had very little personal contact, it's important not to forget that deeply sad things exist in life. To be completely rigorous (or at least a little rigorous): while I still maintain that individuals can decide what has meaning and therefore to a large extent choose what is happy and sad, I know that there are things that are nearly impossible not to consider sad--because of the ingrained processes of our mind that compels them to be sad and because any value system in which life is valuable necessitates there to be deep sadness in life--simply because a part of life is death, not to mention sickness, poverty, inequity, crime, and heart-break. For all of my optimism, I've lost sight that sad things exist, and sometimes you don't need to try to--sometimes it's jarring to try to--make them positive. I'll end my post there--my first post, I believe, without some uplifting message at the end. How's that for ironic on a post titled optimism.

Word Up,
DK Says

Shades of Gray

At my house, laundry is a task performed on a grand scale. Laundry in college is to laundry at home as the Erie canal is to the Panamanian one. While in college I divide clothes into whites and colors (sometimes, if I haven't done laundry in a while, I go crazy and separate light colored clothes from dark colored clothes), at home there are many more baskets devoted to laundry, and those baskets are put to good use. Each basket houses a different shade or hue, and the color differentiation is impressive and daunting. I have to be honest, when I sort laundry from a hamper at home I always have clothes where I am not sure what basket they should go into. Is an olive green light green or is it a dark green that should go with tans? These types of decisions are very hard for me: its hard for me to just choose a basket and I often instead take shortcuts by leaving the clothes I am unsure about in the bottom of the hamper I am clearing out. Call me an unthinking, spineless perfectionist but I am going to say it like I prefer to see it: sometimes shades of gray are off-putting.

Post about Lack of Posts

Hello,

Sorry about the lack of posts. A lot of it during the academic school year has to do with just being busy, but during spring break I can't plead the homework excuse. Some of not posting has to do with being busy enjoying other things (but when a noticeable amount of time spent enjoying other things consists of surfing espn.com and facebook it might be more appropriate to call 'enjoying other things' 'being lazy'). This would actually be my preferred reason for why I have not posted very often, but to be honest, a lot of the times I just don't have anything to talk about in a blog post at the end of the day. This is a bit disappointing as I feel in any given day I should have learned or experienced enough to make a blog post. Maybe I can go on a hot streak, and put on a good run of posts. I'll start with a couple of tonight.

Peace,
Dksays.

Observatins from Today

• As I was driving to a coffee meeting at 9:30 in the morning, my navigation system said "destination, ahead, 500 feet, on the left." I retorted: "Your Mom's on the left." My navigation system didn't respond.
  
• Kartik pointed out that retroviruses are 'oldschool.' Which is an ironic pun because HIV, the most famous of retroviruses, was not discovered in humans until very recently.
  
• I had my first encounter of knowing someone purely from a facebook photo...I was very sure the person next to me in coffee was in a picture with a facebook friend of mind. This was quite distracting, not to mention concerning in confirming of my overuse of facebook.
  
• We did not have any candles left, so we acted out candles for our Friday night Shabbat dinner by using the same hand gestures Stanford fans use when cheering on a player during free throws. The whole spirit fingers gesture thing. What a versatile hand gesture.

So with that *spirit figure gensture* goodbye and goodnight.

A Viral Story

This break, I am looking at Yale medical labs that look interesting in the hopes of find a lab to do research at this summer. I am especially interested in a particular lab that focuses on how retroviruses, the family of virus that includes HIV, infect cells. While I was starting to read through some of the research papers that this lab has published, despite the papers being no Harry Potters and requiring more google searches (to understand certain terms) than a final exam (which needs google searches for procrastination's sake), they had an undeniable narrative. Badass, secretive retroviruses infilitrate immune cells and take over the cell's machinery. While this of course, is a well known tale, it gets more interesting as the lab begins to provide additional narrative detail. See cells that are attacked by retroviruses aren't as much military bases like Fort Sumter, which if captured simply provide ammunition and weapons for the virsues's machinations. No, immune cells are like naval ships, a la pirates of the carribean. If retroviruses can seize control of immune cells the lab has shown, it can steer and extend membrane connections, similar to rope ladders, to connect to a nearby immune-cell/ship, and 10 times more efficiently infilitrate and take over that cell/ship that it is in contact with. If the Cold War was America vs. Retroviruses, not only would we have been fighting a naval battle as aforementioned, but containment would have been an essentially pragmatic and necessary paradigm. The battle strategy would necessarily have included cutting down the rope bridges between ships a.k.a. inhibiting the formation of membrane connections that facilitate transfer of HIV virus (which the lab has shown can be done). These fairly choppy, incoherent analogies are just from a brief skimming of two papers, but I can't wait to uncover additional narration (hopefully I can even spend all summer unraveling the story if there is an opening in this lab that would allow me to work in it).

I got to be honest, though, maybe this post is at some level inspired by my unceasing desire to be like Barack Obama. To see how Obama might see the world with a narrative-frame-of mind, read this really inetersting article http://www.gq.com/news-politics/politics/200911/barack-obama-writing-books-writer-robert-draper?printable=true (I found this article on an awesome blog called givemesomethingtoread.com, a blog which I found out about from Sean--thanks Sean!)

Born to Love Running

On my flight back to California, I read a book titled "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen." The hidden tribe the book refers to is the Tarahumara tribe from Northern Mexico (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarahumara). The tribe is renowned for its ability to run loooooooooooooooong distances (up to 160 km or 99.5 miles in a day according to wikipedia). To be honest, I read the book a little out of default. I was looking for a good book to take out from the Yale library to read on the plane ride, and after finding all the books I had recorded on my post-it-note of books-to-read were not available in the library (Yale allowing you to take out 150 books at a time for a month or so is great for academic papers, but it makes things rather competitive and difficult when it comes to taking out popular, more leisurely works), I moved on to books that looked interesting from the New York Times Best Seller list. Born to run was really the only one available in the library. To make the story a little more romantic, I had to go all the way up to the fourth-floor (and the auxiliary wing of the fourth floor) of our largest and most labrythian library, Sterling Memorial Library, in order to find the book--so I myself traveled long distances to find this book. The book was filled with interesting characters and annecdotes--but what I took away most from the book the was the depiction that Tarahumara really love to run. I can't imagine running 100 miles in a day, but I suppose it only makes sense that if you are going to run 100 miles in a day, you are probably going to have to love doing so. I am tempted to apply this lesson to the gym...but I gotta be honest, I just don't love running on treadmills. And I'm not going to love running on treadmills. It's not going to happen. But like the Tarahurama love a central logistic of their life, running, maybe I can come to have a similar exuberant love for the primary logistics of my life--car rides, home-work, chores, blog updating (kidding about the blog updating--not a central chore and I already enjoy it). We'll see, we'll see.

Writing Block

I haven't posted on my blog for quite a while, and to tell you the truth, nothing really jumps out at me to write now. Which is to say, the only thing that jumps out is that I don't really have anything in particular to say. I think that is a product of the vastness of potential thoughts, rather than a lack of opportunities for thought. In economics, my professor briefly mentioned how thought might be one of the few things that is not 'scarce'-- in other words, thought doesn't appear to be something you allocate per se. I mean you allocate your time, and thus to a certain extent, you can allocate time for thinking about different things, but you don't have a discrete quantity of thought, independent of time, that you allocate to different purposes. All the same, I too often forget this. I am intensely impatient when it comes to thoughts and discussions--I love to read and to think and to discuss, but if a novel, radio program, or even preson loses the train of thought I find relevant....well, the 'offending' party might as well have put on a red sox hat. It's hard to exactly define what I find 'relevant' but I think it relates to my rigid if general idea of what is important as well as an ability to affect the subject I am thinking about. Perhaps this impatience and devotion to relevance is truly a concession to the limits of time: I feel like I only have so much time, I need to spend it thinking about important things I can affect. But given the quantity of time I have devoted to watching Entourage, my guess is that it's not really an allocation of time thing. That's not to say that it is not related to time-- I think the combination of the infinite space of thought and the finite space of time react to form a debilitating fear. My impatience with 'irrelevant' thought is a product of the desire to do, conquer, think everything and a related fear of a fail in my pursuit of everything. Since thought is so vast, and I canot think everything, the only way I have come to differentiate between what I should think about and should not think about...wait, I guess this is an allocation which makes thought scarce by association with time. All right, fine, thought is scarce! But it isn't that scarce... So, as I was saying, the only way I have to differentiate between what I should think about and not think about is to use the metric of what is 'relevant.' But while I might not be able to think about everything, thought is not so scarce as to limit to narrow relevance. Especially because even given my prior definition of relevance, it is hard to know what will be relevant in the future. There's not too many things that aren't very scarce, (a lack of scarcity is quite scarce...hehe) so I might as well take advantage of thought. So here's to a lavish indulgence of irrelevant thought in the future.

1st the worst, Second the Best, Third the One with the Holliday Gift Suggestion

Wow. I've learned a lot in the last few weeks, and for brevity (which is clearly my strong-suit), I will resort to an itemized format-Top Three Things I've learned this week.

1. Stanford (Men's Basketball) is going to have an entertaining season. Okay, maybe this shouldn't be first, but they JUST lost to a buzzer-beating shot...and it's very, very painful :(.

2. From Cog-Sci (and then a little more from NPR): Our decisions are influenced by a number of non-logical, non-rational factors. Things such as whether we hold a warm or a cold cup of coffee for just a second or two can heavily influence things like whether we judge a person, based on a few sentence description, friendly or non-friendly. There are likely tens of thousands (that's just a made up estimate, but it sounds impressively accurate) of these seemingly bizarre correlations, ingrained by evolution (and quirk effects of evolution), and we are unlikely to discover all of them in my mind. To find out more, including why holding a cup of warm coffee might be correlated with friendship I highly recommend the NPR Radiolab program on decisions: you can find all of Radiolabs programs at http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/ (product placement for NPR baby!) Some people have suggested this strongly challenges the notion of conscious free-will (since there are so many of these correlations that are unknowingly and strongly influencing our decisions). I take a much more moderate approach. For many decisions, I know am not fully and rationally thinking about why I make them--and I think it is quite likely that these 'heuristics' are influencing my decisions in non-rational ways--and I am not overly concerned. I know my choice of cereal is a matter of non-rational, emotional love--it's not conscious free-will, it's destiny! I nonetheless believe, however, that for more significant decisions, while some of these heuristics are nonetheless influential, rationality and consciousness can be the most influential components. At a minimum, our own consciousness of rationality suggests it plays at least a partial role (unless it is a post-fact phenomenon, but I doubt this, but I'll leave that topic out for now). Further, I think by learning some of these heuristics, we can be aware and attenuate their impact (if it is harmful) in our more important decisions.

3. From Constitution Class (section): The official Washington D.C. License Plate has the moniker "taxation without representation." My prediction: this stuff is going to be more popular than tickle-me-elmo was in 2001 this holliday season.


I think that's going to do for tonight. Much more to come tomorrow night

Lab Report

So I've been 'working' for 30 minutes now, and I have the header "Results and Calculations: Part 1." Productive 1/2 hour. I think I need to learn how to study on Friday nights for the next couple of weeks.