Mark Reynolds > Recent Status Updates

The writing is very simplistic and juvenile. There’s some good information, but it’s very hard for me to enjoy reading it. So I’m going to put it in the “gave up on” pile.

Incredibly depressing. And incredibly ironic, considering that I am typing this from my smart phone, which uses quite a bit of cobalt from the Congo.

Intense already. Lots of guilt for using electronics built from cobalt mined by the extremely poor in the Congo.

Nice description of the entire atmosphere surrounding the match. I don’t think there’s anything new, although some of the details are new to me.

Nice first few chapters for beginning math and physics students. Hopefully it encourages them to look beyond the mundane (but necessary) problems in their textbooks.

[Don't] intellectually misinterpret Aristotle. “Art imitates nature” does not mean that art should imitate the appearance of nature but the nature of nature.

So far, enjoyable. Bertrand Russell: “There was a footpath leading across fields to New Southgate, and I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.”

Martin Delaney, unlike Frederick Douglass, is someone I’ve not heard of. But he sounds quite interesting.

The preface is a depressing view of the current (1996) state of cultural antipathy toward science:

“An ever widening gap separates the corpus of knowledge and the scientific worldview on the one hand and the popular understanding of these on the other.”

Very long!

Lots of great advice. "Express yourself as you are."

“The white men are like locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is like a snowstorm. You may kill one, two, ten; yes, as many as the leaves in the forest yonder, and their brothers will not miss them. Count your fingers all day long and white men with guns in their hands will come faster than you can count.”
- Shakopee, Sioux chief

The 1871 Indian Appropriations Act stated:
“hereafter, no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States, shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power, with whom the United States may contract by treaty.”

Depressing. As I already knew, the US screwed the native Americans over and over. In 1492 there were approximately 60 million in the Americas. And now there’s essentially no trace of them.

So far, good writing!

“There are no Zen teachers and nothing to teach.” John Daido Loori

“Just sit long enough, and eventually, maybe after many lifetimes, you will come upon the truth.” Toni Packer