Leon Atkinson's Blog, page 7

Praise Bacon! And May Bacon Be With You Always.

Escuse me, sir. Can you spare a few moments to talk about Bacon?

United Church of Bacon | Praise Bacon! And May Bacon Be With You Always.

The United Church of Bacon founders have set forth a general mission.

First and foremost, Praise Bacon! (Even if you don’t like bacon – gasp – all you have to do is enjoy the scent.)
Openly fight religious discrimination against non-religious people and demand equal rights for everyone
Provide wedding services to the secular people of the world
To encourage people to report violations of the law by church members or officials who believe they deserve special privileges while at church

Drink unfiltered coffee

Reading this compelled me to make a pot of what my dad called “Sheepherder’s Coffee”, otherwise known as cowboy coffee. He learned to make coffee that way hanging out with guys in southern Idaho, and he made coffee that way every morning, frequently letting it boil over and making a mess on the stove. It takes a long time and you inevitably get grounds in your teeth, but it is the most delicious coffee.

Should you drink your coffee filtered?

Coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world. Arguably a key reason for this is that coffee has psychoactive properties that we may be hardwired to value, even if subconsciously. For example, it increases alertness; possibly a fitness-enhancing effect in our evolutionary past. Here the term “fitness” in “fitness-enhancing effect” means “reproductive success”, and does not mean having great athletic ability or having shredded abs.

Advice on getting what you want

Richard Nikoley has some advice I typically give as “be like the Internet–route around the slow nodes”.

How to Deal With Other Human Animals Who Live By Force or Quasi Force | Free The Animal

Next time you get really, really pissed off by some organization, do a self experiment in extreme self control. Take pleasure, at least, in the fact that you can. …And, upon reflection, you just might laugh out loud over the juxtaposition. Most of all, before you pick up that phone or send that email, ask yourself: what is my objective? If your objective is to make someone feel shitty, that’s easy enough and anyone can do it. Just pick up the phone or hit send from a stream of consciousness with no review or deliberation.

…Or, start a somewhat cathartic blog. …Call it “Free the Animal,” or something. 

On the other hand, daily life is important. The more time you spend doing what you love, relishing the company of people you love, the better. You can pay for that extra time by dropping pretenses of propriety, right and wrong, demanding “justice” over minutae and hey, even giving that person on the other end of the line undeserved flattery in order to minimize time and trouble, and get what you need.

Give it a try.

Fiber is Bad for Sex

The idea of eating more fiber was invented to give you constipation so you wouldn’t enjoy sex. Just one of Kellogg’s sadistic ideas that also included circumcision for the prevention of masturbation and Prussian-style schools for transforming curious kids into mindless factory drones.

Dietary Fiber Is Bad for Sex – That’s the Only Claim About It That Isn’t a Myth | Mark’s Daily Apple

Does dietary fiber contain anything of nutritional value? No, it doesn’t. Zero vitamins… Zero minerals… Zero protein… Zero fat… Nothing, zilch, not even digestible carbohydrates. Why, then, is it considered a healthy nutrient? As the story goes, you can thank Dr. John Harvey Kellogg for that:

“Dr. Kellogg was obsessed with chastity and constipation. True to principle, he never made love to his wife. To “remedy” the sin of masturbation, he advocated circumcision without anesthetic for boys, and mutilation of the clitoris with carbolic acid for girls. He blamed constipation for “nymphomania” in women, and lust in men, because, according to Kellogg, impacted stools inside one’s rectum were stimulating the prostate gland and the female vagina into sexual proclivity.” [link]

Two Guided Meditations from Sam Harris

Click through to grab the MP3s or listen in the page. Tre, Henry and I all tried the 9-minute version, and I was proud of Henry for lasting at least 7 mintues without fidgeting.

The Mirror of Mindfulness : Two Guided Meditations : Sam Harris

I wrote an article on meditation two years ago, and since then many readers have asked for further guidance on how to practice. As I said in my original post, I generally recommend a method called vipassana in which one cultivates a form of attention widely known as “mindfulness.” There is nothing spooky or irrational about mindfulness, and the literature on its psychological benefits is now substantial. Mindfulness is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and nondiscursive attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Developing this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness. I will cover the relevant philosophy and science in my next book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, but in the meantime, I have produced two guided meditations (9 minutes and 26 minutes) for those of you who would like to get started with the practice. Please feel free to share them. – See more at: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/mi...

Handwriting recognition added to Gmail

You can turn on handwriting recognition in Gmail now. Go to settings, general tab. Enable input tools. Go back and start writing an email. There’s a new button on the upper right, between the pagination and settings gear. Click it and a window appears for you to draw in.

Official Gmail Blog: Handwriting input comes to Gmail and Google Docs

Gmail and Docs offer wide language support, however in some cases using the keyboard is less than ideal. Whether you’re a student trying to include a foreign phrase in your paper or an international consultant hoping to begin your message with a friendly local greeting, now you’ll be able to use your own handwriting to input words directly into Gmail and Google Docs with your mouse or trackpad.

Simplify Commerce Event Types

I recently completed a project to integrate Simplify Commerce into Clinalytic, a note-taking application for psychologists. The service’s API lives up to its name. Integration was simple. Being new, there are a few gaps in features and documentation, but engineers are quick to reply to support emails.

In the missing-features box, I’d put the ability to use a card token to save a card to a customer’s account. At the moment, you can create a card token in-browser and then use it to do a one-time charge. But that charge will not be associated with the customer. It’s a minor issue, but would add another layer of security because I would avoid ever having a credit card number reaching my server. The card tokens can be created in the browser alone.

In the missing documentation box, I’ve got a need for more information about incoming events. You can register a URL for accepting callbacks from Simplify that describe various events. The tutorial shows one event, but the docs fail to list the others. Fortunately, the support team sent me a list that I’ll share below.

 

chargeback.processed
invoice.processed
deposit.processed
deposit.failed
coupon.create
coupon.delete
customer.create
customer.delete
customer.update
invoiceItem.create
invoiceItem.update
invoiceItem.delete
invoice.update
invoice.card.exp
invoice.unpaid
payment.create
plan.create
plan.update
plan.delete
refund.create
subscription.create
subscription.update
subscription.delete

If you’ve read through the API docs, the event names ought to be all you need to understand what they are about. Events fire regardless of source, either using an API call or using the Web interface at simplify.com. And the data returned in the callback generally matches the data returned by the find methods available in the API. I’m told all this will be documented in detail on the Simplify site.

 

Steam Family Sharing

This will make it a lot easier for me to introduce PC games to my two boys. And it will be one more reason to put a Linux box in the family room.

Steam Family Sharing lets users share games with unique saves

Steam Family Sharing enables users to share their entire library of games with up to 10 other Steam members – Steam suggests “close friends and family members.” Users request access to a friend’s library, and if their computer is authorized, they have access to all of the games in that friend’s library, complete with the ability to earn their own Steam achievements and save their own progress to the Steam Cloud.

Peikoff on the Snowden Issue

Great, fiery analysis of the NSA spying from Peikoff. For someone who’s already pessimistic about the decline of civilization it’s remarkable that given this information he’d downgrade his outlook.

Episode 283 « Itunes Podcast « Peikoff
Date: August 23rd, 2013
Duration: 27:41

The Bicameral Mind Theory

I recently read Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and really enjoyed it. You need nothing more to recommend it than the following quote from Richard Dawkins.

“It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I’m hedging my bets.”

Wikipedia offers a fine description of bicameralism, Jaynes’ theory of a human consciousness split into two parts. He argues in the book that ancient man may have experienced the world in what we would consider an unconscious state. Instead of an integrated consciousness we take for granted, he suggests until perhaps 2000 BCE, people’s left and right hemispheres communicated indirectly through auditory hallucinations similar to those of schizophrenics.

It’s fascinating how this theory is nearly forty years old, not widely accepted but still hanging in there.

Julian Jaynes Society | Exploring Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind Theory Since 1997

Why are gods and idols ubiquitous throughout the ancient world? What is the relationship of consciousness and language? How is it that oracles came to influence entire civilizations such as Greece? If consciousness arose far back in human evolution, how can it so easily be altered in hypnosis and “possession”? Is schizophrenia a vestige of an earlier mentality? These are just some of the difficult questions addressed by Julian Jaynes’s influential and controversial theory of the origin of subjective consciousness or the “modern mind.”