“umwelt”

From a Hacker News discussion about org-mode in emacs. Reproduced here for ease of use. Emphasis mine.

“There’s a scientific term “umwelt” that biologists use to describe the world as experienced by a particular organism. Every one of us has this “umwelt” - our “subjective view of the world.” Our umwelt is limited by our physical and mental capabilities, past experiences, and social circles we grow up and live. e.g., your subjective understanding of Renaissance Art would drastically differ from when you’re taken to a museum at the age of three, and when you go there as an adult, or after studying art for fifteen years.”

Birthdays are crap.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love a party. And I think it’s a great idea to bring people together in celebration, so I’m not saying that the concept of regularly celebrating the evolution of one’s life is crap, just that trying to measure the evolution of your life in time periods defined by how long it takes a particular rock to orbit around a particular ball of fusion-plasma is crap.

In practice, paying a lot of attention to each particular birthday gets swapped with gradually focusing your attention on birthdays that fall on nice, round number sort of years. Like numbers divisible by 5, or 10. And, let’s be honest, this is a cudgel, and the only reason it’s not totally ridiculous is because humans currently only live for about 100 years, max, so we don’t really have to deal with the breakdown of this system as t→∞.

So, how do we fix it?

These are my dotfiles. There are many like them, but these ones are mine.

I’m a firm believer that no matter your circumstances, you can always find ways to keep moving forward.

Enter the quarantine.

Everything is the same as in normal chess, except that before the game begins, you secretly pick two of your pawns, and those two pawns can, in addition to all of the normal pawn moves, move and capture like a king.

Before the game begins, each player should write down the starting file of their two super soldier pawns, to avoid any potential cheating.

This is an old project from the earlier days of E&M Labs, but I love it anyway. Total time spent on this, iirc, was about two hours of designing the laser-cut parts, and about half an hour of assembly. Lasers make everything better.

(download .png, .svg)