The combined forces were impressive. More than 80 choir members glided onto the stage, clothed in black, as if they were wraiths, now summoned to writhe before the Final Judge, before whom no one can be found blameless.
And I, a shame-faced mortal, sat with my flesh, (which is unceasingly beset with attacks of urine and excrement), awaiting the Strings section to stab the air with dramatic statements of tension and unease.
Art should comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable.
What a blessing it is to enjoy music – on both listening and performing ends – at public pianos.
Let me recount some memorable encounters while I was plonking away at the keys.
“My father is dead. Before he died, he used to play this song for me. Can you play it?”
“sure, I can't play it fluently, as I'm unfamiliar with it, but I can try.”
“Thank you.”
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep; 'God is not dead, nor doth he sleep! The Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail, With peace on earth, good-will to men!' – H. W. Longfellow
I have never had a father’s protection from danger, and I have never had a mother’s tender touch.
Every passer-by could see I was lost and abandoned, but no one had the willingness to help; or, even if they had, they lacked the ability. They shook their heads, and said, “it’s sad to see this”, and then went on with their lives.
I present, below, a list of opinions about the millenia-old practice of masturbation and sexual activity.
Can your mind process these opinions and come to a conclusion that makes sense to yourself?
The world is a noisy place. Everyone has an opinion. And you know what humorous uncles say about opinions: 'it's like an anus. Everyone has one.'
Yet wars are started on opinions, and friendships are similarly broken through opinions: “I am right and you are wrong.”
It seems the wind is now blowing in the direction of community-building, in various small pockets of society.
I have been learning a lot, through such communities, over the past few days.
But, as an eccentric-yet-wise elder said, “I learnt a lot. But by the time I learnt a lot, I am dying. So I wrote a book to pass on what I have learnt.”
This is by way of passing it on.
P. S. I am grateful for no Covid lock-down today. shivers at the thought.
The young pianists – twenty-somethings, they looked like – were performing on either a Steinway or a Fazioli: grand pianos. Bach, and Liszt, and Mozart seemed to be popular choices. One of the pianists even nourished the audience with her own composition, a piece for a small ensemble: 1 harp, 2 cellos, 2 double basses, 1 percussion (drums), 1 horn, 1 flute, 1 clarinet.
That pianist-composer thanked God for holding her hand while walking through difficult times. She shared that her hands had suffered an injury while preparing for a performance.
I shall apply Chatham House Rules.
And I will wrap it up in five sections:
It's nice to attend to one's biological needs in the privacy of a toilet. However, city-life does not always promise that a toilet will be nearby when one needs to defecate. Or, even if a toilet is nearby, it may be fully occupied.
What, then?
As things turned out, the call of nature has resulted in screaming outrage, reflected in news articles.
Dear me,
You are struggling. You are struggling so bad.
You are in a desert. Humans appear, and you are scared. Your fear rubs off on them. You hiss and spit at them. They attack you. You flee.
Tomorrow it's more of the same. No end is in sight.
In celebration of video games from the 2000s
I love a challenging Final Boss High difficulty means high reward But all my strategies cease When you, my beloved Final Boss, dies I’ve killed you, yes — And then, what am I left with? What am I left with? “Don’t die now,” I whisper, ”It’s been too fun” “Thank you for playing,” they callously applaud “What’s next?” my brain blindly gropes
I received an invitation, as below.
Hi everyone! This Thursday 4-5pm, we have Elliott Thornley, a visiting Research Fellow from Oxford University, speaking on the topic of “Can incomplete preferences keep artificial agents shutdownable?”
In this event, Elliot will explain the shutdown problem: the problem of ensuring that advanced artificial agents never resist shutdown. Elliot will then propose a solution: we train agents to have incomplete preferences. He will suggest a method for training such agents using reinforcement learning, and present experimental evidence in favour of the method. He will explain how work on the shutdown problem fits into a larger project called ‘constructive decision theory’: using ideas from decision theory to design and train artificial agents.