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"When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind."
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Scales and Purpose
Every day, I get up after around six hours of sleep, brushing away the trailing remnants of a fantastic dreamworld and forcing my eyes open. I water my plants, eat breakfast, and make some coffee. I pack up my gear and move outside. I walk uphill to a tall tower. I wait for lifts, unlock doors, and move things around. I read a little, write a little, and take a break to eat. I pack up my gear. I wait for the lift. I walk downhill. I unlock more doors. I close my eyes.
In the midst of the even mind-numbing routine, or perhaps especially in middle of repetitive, stereotyped actions, a stray thought can’t help being created in our minds. It’s a small nagging voice, often drowned in the noise of traffic and everyday existence, that occasionally breaks the waves, saying, “Why do we do what we do?” Why do we do anything of what we do? Why do we wake up every day, why do we go to work, why do we walk uphill, and why do we pretty much the same thing we do every single day?
Some of us console ourselves by pretending that all our actions make sense in some grand destiny: actions that appear to the undiscerning eye as mindless routine come together and make sense on some larger scale. Individualists work in stereotyped ways to achieve some grand design over long time scales. Collective workers work in unison to build something evident on the scale of several human lives, but invisible in individual life.
Some of us don’t really think of this, and do what we do because it’s the path of least resistance from one dreamless sleep to the next. For some of us, the struggle from one day to the next is so difficult that if we stopped to think, we wouldn’t make it. Also, it’s not like we don’t know why we do what we do: it’s for survival, plain and simple.
What we experience as the continuity of conscious existence is a unstable, transient existence for a loosely bound collection of things that will quickly disintegrate and indiscriminately diffuse away. However, in the temporary state between birth and death, we have to think about what we do, because it is important: not important in a grand sense, because nothing actually is, but important in a personal sense, because this is the only thing we can find important, and only we can find this thing important: no one else cares.
If you haven’t thought about precisely why you’re sitting right here, doing what you’re doing now, you’re probably wasting your time.
Our sense of self is mental shorthand for a collection of ideas and memories and emotions that will die when our bodies die unless we spread them to other, younger bodies. A great idea lives on forever for two reasons: firstly, because of the people it affects and changes, and secondly, because the idea itself is copied, modified, improved and passed on.
The only thing you can do that is personally important and globally meaningful is to do something; to grow and distribute a new idea, to change people’s lives for the better because the change is the ultimate goal; to change our collective understanding of the world and of ourselves because that’s how we want the world to be.
People who are perceived as “doing something”, i.e., achieving some sort of meaningful, perhaps positive change, expend their efforts at different scales. A quiet, young woman wishes to work in orphanages, serving as a role model for individual children. The number of children whose lives she can change is limited; her interaction with them will be intensive. This is an example of a wish to do “microscopic” good. It is almost certain that her work will not really change the statistics of social dynamics and the global incidents of the evil she wishes to fight, but the effects of her efforts, measured on her time scale, on her spatial scale, are real, large, and tangible.
On the other extreme, a dreamy idealist wished to change large numbers of people. He writes books expressing his ideas, not knowing who would read them. He does things so that his actions can be seen, and could affect the behaviour of millions. All personal wishes become subordinate to his desire to change as many lives as possible. Many people know him and admire him, but his life is lonely and peerless. His is an example of a wish to do “macroscopic” good. His actions do change society on large, statistical scales, and endure for time scales that shall exceed his own.
Whatever the scale of one’s life and of one’s actions, the only measure of all things is how it affects others. Every single thing you do that involves only yourself, every thing you do that benefits no one, that is seen by no one, that in no meaningful way affects the life of any one else, is something that will die with you, something that will affect the course of humanity in no way whatsoever. It is, in this grand sense, completely meaningless.
But every action you do that makes other people’s lives better, even incrementally, will be remembered for all eternity; if not in the written history of men, then in the ineffable cultural consciousness we all share.
That is your choice, now, and that is your answer to everything. -
Books are weapons in the war of ideas.
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Remote, Automatic Backups using rsync, ssh and crontab
What you want to do: create and maintain an incremental backup some data on /copy/from/here on a local computer to /copy/to/here on a remote computer, transmitting the backup securely, efficiently and periodically, without any user intervention.
How to do it:
1) Test rsync from the command line
2) Enable password-less logins over SSH
3) Tell cron to periodically execute this task
Step 1: Test rsync from the command line
From your local computer, try
rsync —verbose -r -u /copy/from/here/ remoteuser@remotecomputer.org:~/copy/to/here/
It will ask you to authenticate on the remote computer. Once you do so, rsync should copy everything from /copy/from/here to /copy/to/here on remotecomputer
If this doesn’t work, there is something wrong with your SSH connection, or with your installation of rsync.
Step 2: Enable password-less logins over SSH
From localcomputer, try
localuser@localcomputer$ ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (~/.ssh/id_rsa):[Enter key]
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): [Press enter key]
Enter same passphrase again: [Press enter key]
Your identification has been saved in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
33:b3:fe:af:95:95:18:11:31:d5:de:96:2f:f2:35:f9 localuser@localcomputer
You’ve just made yourself a RSA key. Copy the public key to the remote computer and put it in .ssh/authorized_keys on remote computer.
That’s it. Try SSHing to remotecomputer from localcomputer. You should be able to log in without entering a password. If this worries you, try logging in from a different computer. It should prompt you for authorisation then.
Step 3: Automate backups
Add the rsync command to your crontab file. If you run Mac OS X, you can use Cronnix, which is a thin GUI around crontab to make editing it easier. -
Here, Rippingille’s is trying to associate their product with the global appeal of the Empire and its peoples. It’s feeding off of the idea that Britain was the workshop of the world, and that the industrial power that Britain could bring to bear was to the benefit of all those who came into contact with it. They are not exactly subtle with this message: “England’s gift A blessing to all nations.” The gift being industrial expertise. Also note the typically pastoral English scene in the bottom corner of the poster. This scene would have been used to evoke feelings of nostalgia and normalcy for the Briton and foreigner alike. This was all part of a confused and difficult balancing act between portraying Britain as an industrial powerhouse and yet remaining some sort of pastoral idyll.
More great stuff from here.
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Alex Steffen on The shareable future of cities
He mentions this remarkable graph or energy consumption on transport vs population density:
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Map of the square and stationary earth. As it should be.
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NPR books' list of top 100 Sci-Fi and Fantasy
The Lord of the Rings is an undeserving #1, above Slaughterhouse Five, 1984, The Foundation Trilogy and Watchmen. That said, you really can’t go wrong with any of the first 20 on the list.
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Jonathan's Card
An experiment in real-world honesty: download this card and get a coffee at Starbucks for free. If you want to be a decent human being, reload whenever you want to.
