The psychology of prediction...........

     As the new year looms and the prediction industry gears up, you might consider reading this Morgan Housel essay with 12 noteworthy points on the subject. 

"But prediction is hard. Either you know that or you’re in denial about it.  A lot of the reason it’s hard is because the visible stuff that happens in the world is a small fraction of the hidden stuff that goes on inside people’s heads. The former is easy to overanalyze; the latter is easy to ignore."

If you say so.......................

A supernova remnant:

Explanation: What has this supernova left behind? As little as 2,000 years ago, light from a massive stellar explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) first reached planet Earth. The LMC is a close galactic neighbor of our Milky Way Galaxy and the rampaging explosion front is now seen moving out - destroying or displacing ambient gas clouds while leaving behind relatively dense knots of gas and dust. What remains is one of the largest supernova remnants in the LMC: N63A. Many of the surviving dense knots have been themselves compressed and may further contract to form new stars. Some of the resulting stars may then explode in a supernova, continuing the cycle. Featured here is a combined image of N63A in the X-ray from the Chandra Space Telescope and in visible light by Hubble. The prominent knot of gas and dust on the upper right -- informally dubbed the Firefox -- is very bright in visible light, while the larger supernova remnant shines most brightly in X-rays. N63A spans over 25 light years and lies about 150,000 light years away toward the southern constellation of Dorado.

Otherwise.............................

       via

Test time.................................

In the background.....................

Stan Getz.................and his album What The World Needs Now

The world's first blogger............

     We labor only to fill out memory, and leave the understanding and the conscience empty.  Just as birds sometimes go in quest of grain, and carry it in the beak without tasting it to give a beakful to their little ones, so our pedants go pillaging knowledge in books and lodge it only on the end of their lips, in order merely to disgorge it and scatter it to the winds.
      It is wonderful how appropriately this folly fits my case.  Isn't it doing the same thing, what I do in most of this composition?  I go about cadging from books here and there the sayings that please me, not to keep them, for I have no storehouses, but to transport them into this one, in which, to tell he truth, they are no more mine than in their original place.  We are, I believe, learned only with present knowledge, not with past, any more than with future.

-Michel De Montaigne, from his essay Of Pedantry, from The Complete Works

Everything...........................

"Only be training ourselves to calm down and listen can we begin to recognize the word of God in everything, even the most mundane utterances of life."

-The Monks of New Skete:  In the Spirit of Happiness

About the future......................

"Remember, there's no greatness in the future.  Or clarity.  Or insight.  Or happiness.  Or peace.  There is only this moment.

-Ryan Holiday,  Stillness Is The Key

Love thy neighbour.......................

     We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour.  Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of nature;  he is as strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as the rain.  He is Man, the most terrible of the beasts.  That is why the old religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom when they spoke, not of one's duty to humanity, but one's duty towards one's neighbour.  The duty towards humanity may often take the form of some choice which is personal or even pleasurable.  That duty may be a hobby;  it may even be a dissipation.  We may work in the East End because we are peculiarly fitted to work in the East End, or because we think we are;  we may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting.   The most monstrous martyrdom, the most repulsive experience, bay be the result of choice or a kind of taste.  We may be so made as to be particularly fond of lunatics or specially interested in leprosy.  We may love negroes because they are black or German Socialists because they are pedantic.  But we have to love our neighbor because he is there—a much more alarming reason for a much more serious operation.  He is the sample of humanity which is actually given us.  Precisely because he may be anybody he is everybody.  He is a symbol because he is an accident.

-G. K. Chesterton, from his 1905 essay On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family

In the background

Earlier Fleetwood Mac........................the Mystery To Me album

And I don't even watch the news...........

And the question arose...........

........................................................"How much should we know?"  And the answer gently wafted by, " Not so much."

Explanation: Beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 6744 is nearly 175,000 light-years across, larger than our own Milky Way. It lies some 30 million light-years distant in the southern constellation Pavo and appears as only a faint, extended object in small telescopes. We see the disk of the nearby island universe tilted towards our line of sight in this remarkably detailed galaxy portrait, a telescopic view that spans an area about the angular size of a full moon. In it, the giant galaxy's elongated yellowish core is dominated by the light from old, cool stars. Beyond the core, grand spiral arms are filled with young blue star clusters and speckled with pinkish star forming regions. An extended arm sweeps past a smaller satellite galaxy (NGC 6744A) at the lower right. NGC 6744's galactic companion is reminiscent of the Milky Way's satellite galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud.

      "The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine.  He who sees moral nature out and out, and thoroughly knows how knowledge is acquired and character formed is a pedant.  The simplicity of nature is not that which may easily be read, but is inexhaustible.  The last analysis can no wise be made.  We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that the perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth.  The wild fertility of nature is felt in comparing our rigid names and reputations with our fluid consciousness."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his 1841 Spiritual Laws essay

Plus, it's not difficult....................

"If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters."

-Epictetus

In the background...................

The Rippingtons...........................................Deep Powder

Marcus says........................

". . . nothing can be good for a man unless it helps to make him just, self-disciplined, courageous, and independent; and nothing bad unless it has the contrary effect."

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Eight, 1.

Merry Christmas........................

O holy night, the stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of the dear Saviour’s birth;
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
'Till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn;

Fall on your knees, Oh hear the angel voices!
O night divine! O night when Christ was born.
O night, O holy night, O night divine.

Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is Love and His gospel is Peace;
All chains shall he break, everyone is our brother,
And in his name all oppression shall cease,
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful Chorus raise we;
Let all within us praise his Holy name!

Fall on your knees, Oh hear the angel voices!
O night divine! O night when Christ was born.
O night, O holy night, O night divine.

Whether I am on it, or not..........

“To ensure that there are as few interruptions as possible, immense quantities of electricity are deployed to keep everything running with precision and perfection and permanence.  2 percent of America’s electricity now goes to keeping the Internet cool, to keeping the link unbroken, for America and for the world.”


-Simon Winchester, The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible

Now here's...........................

...........................................................a tradition worth emulating.

He recommends keeping score......

     
     One thing I find helpful is growing old.  It's a slow process, but totally worth it compared to dying.  Oldsters such as myself have vastly more experience than the young at being simultaneously wrong and also surprised about it.  In time, we come to understand how easy it is to be confident in our opinions and yet spectacularly wrong.  Or at least we do if we have been keeping score.  And that's exactly what I recommend doing.  Make a mental note every time you find yourself being wrong about something you thought you couldn't possibly be wrong about.  Focusing on your track record can prime you to understand that there can be lots of different explanations for a set of facts, and you can't always think of them all

-Scott Adams,  Loserthink:  How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

In the background........................

Enya..........................................................A Day Without Rain

Engage........................

Lose this day loitering—twill be the same story
To-morrow—and the next more dilatory;
Each indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting o'er lost days,

Are you in earnest? sieze this very minute—
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated—
Begin it, and then the work will be completed!

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,  Lose This Day Loitering

recurrence to the harmony..................

11.  When force of circumstance upsets your equanimity, lose no time in recovering your self-control, and do not remain out of tune longer than you can help.  Habitual recurrence to the harmony will increase your mastery of it.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Six

Face to face............................

In human relations, risk avoidance means the avoidance of accountability, the refusal to stand judged in another’s eyes, the refusal to come face to face with another person, to give oneself in whatever measure to him or her, and so to run the risk of rejection. Accountability is not something we should avoid; it is something we need to learn. Without it we can never acquire either the capacity to love or the virtue of justice. Other people will remain for us merely complex devices, to be negotiated in the way that animals are negotiated, for our own advantage and without opening the possibility of mutual judgment. Justice is the ability to see the other as having a claim on you, as being a free subject just as you are, and as demanding your accountability. To acquire this virtue you must learn the habit of face-to-face encounters, in which you solicit the other’s consent and cooperation rather than imposing your will. The retreat behind the screen is a way of retaining control over the encounter, while minimizing the need to acknowledge the other’s point of view. It involves setting your will outside yourself, as a feature of virtual reality, while not risking it as it must be risked, if others are truly to be encountered. To encounter another person in his freedom is to acknowledge his sovereignty and his right: it is to recognize that the developing situation is no longer within your exclusive control, but that you are caught up by it, made real and accountable in the other’s eyes by the same considerations that make him real and accountable in yours.

-Roger Scruton, from this New Atlantis essay, Hiding Behind The Screen

Just because..............................

August Burns Red...........................................Carol Of The Bells

Opening paragraphs.............

Despite evidence to the contrary, we all use our brains.  but most of us have never learned how to think effectively.  I'm not talking about IQ or other measures of intelligence, which matter in their own way, of course.  I'm talking about thinking as a learned skill.  We don't teach thinking in schools, and you can see the results of that nearly every day.  If you use social media, or you make the mistake of paying attention to to ther people's opinions in any form, you are probably seeing a lot of absurd and unproductive reasoning that I call loserthink.
     Loserthink isn't about being dumb, and it isn't about being underinformed.  Loserthink is about unproductive ways of thinking.  You can be smart and well informed while at the same time being a flagrant loserthinker.  That is not only possible; it's the normal situation.  My observation, after several decades on this planet, is that clear thinking is somewhat rare.  And there's a reason for that.  No matter how smart you are, if you don't have experience across multiple domains, you're probably not equipped with the most productive ways of thinking.

-Scott Adams,  LOSERTHINK:  How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

Can't have too much Emerson..............

"The farmer imagines power and place are fine things.  But the President has paid dear for his White House."

"Every act rewards itself . . ."

"Every opinion reacts on him who utters it."

"a man often pays dear for a small frugality."

"If you are wise, you will dread a prosperity which only loads you with more.  Benefit is the end of nature.  But for every benefit you receive, a tax is levied.  He is great who confers the most benefits."

"The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the power:  but they who do not the thing have not the power."

"it is impossible to get any thing without its price. . ."

"On the other hand, the law holds with equal sureness for all right action.  Love, and you shall be loved."

"The good are befriended even by weakness and defect.  As no man had ever a point of price that was not injurious to him, so no man ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him."

"The soul is."

"There can be no excess to love; none to knowledge; none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense.  The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, all quotes lifted from his 1841 essay, Compensation

the rare and supremely agreeable condition....

     Altogether it takes 7 billion billion billion (that's 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 octillion) atoms to make you.  No one can say why those 7 billion billion billion have such an urgent desire to be you.  They are mindless particles, after all, without a single thought or notion between them.  Yet somehow for the length of your existence, they will build and maintain all the countless systems and structures necessary to keep you humming, and to make you you, to give you form and shape and let you enjoy the rare and supremely agreeable condition known as life.
     That's a much bigger job than you realize.  Unpacked, you are positively enormous.  Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast.  The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around the earth.  The most remarkable part of all is your DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid).  You have a meter of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto.  Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system.  You are int the most literal sense cosmic.

-Bill Bryson, The Body:  A Guide for Occupants

In the background.............

Sir Colin Davis.........Moussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition