Echoes of Cat's Cradle

What if a more sustainable, fitter society is precisely one which sacrifices some degree of individual freedom for the good of the society, of humanity, of the planet? 

Still Profoundly Lost

I'm not sure where I am anymore
Or where I'm going.
Or where I should be.
Or who I really am.
Or should be.
I'm not sure what I should stand for
and whether it's worth it anymore.
Every morning I wake up with a to-do list screaming at me.
So I start diligently going down that list.
And before I know it, it's late in the night again.
And time to sleep again, till the next morning and the next intense burst of stress.
And meanwhile, I seem to be drifting further and further into incoherence.
A bustling incoherence full of exciting possibilities which are pulling you in all sorts of different directions.
Which will end up getting you nowhere, if you don't navigate the currents wisely.
But how should I choose my course?
If I had a choice, what do I really want?
How much of a choice do I even really have?
I don't know.
I don't know anything at all.
Only the daily scramble and grind, and the tiny little bits of sunshine that graces the intervals in between once in a while.
What now?

Finlandia

... here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
but other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine
My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

Verum est, quod legitur

fronte capillata,
sed plerumque sequitur
Occasio calvata.

And never you forget.

Muffin

... possibly from muffen Lower German for  "small cakes", or somehow connected with moufflet Old French for "soft". Who cares as long as it's tasty, right?
Guess that's also why food names generally don't translate well across long distances. Because there's just too much of a connection to the place and culture.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

Metacynicism

The ancient Cynics regarded virtue (Arete) as the only necessity for happiness. They sought to free themselves from conventions, become self-sufficient, and live only in accordance with nature. They rejected any conventional notions of happiness involving money, power, or fame, in the pursuit of virtuous, and thus happy, lives. In rejecting conventional social values, they would criticise the types of behaviours, such as greed, which they viewed as causing suffering. Emphasis on this aspect of their teachings led, in the late 18th and early 19th century, to the modern understanding of cynicism as "an attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust of the integrity or professed motives of others." This modern definition of cynicism is in marked contrast to the ancient philosophy, which emphasized "virtue and moral freedom in liberation from desire."

Vertigo

See now (the myth is that?) it all started that day on the glass ceiling ... and intensified later after you'd packed. And since then you've been griping and moping about being nowhere for very long. You've started to see distance as a hindrance---not quite insuperable, but almost. You've haven't yet quite failed to breathe the air that surrounds you or step on the ground that gladly supports you, but you don't seem to appreciate them nearly as much. Because you can only think, but this is not somewhere else. Or, in a few years' time this too will become only a part of my past.
Mais c'est la vie, n'est-ce pas? It doesn't mean you start mourning in advance for the things that you one day, in the distant or not-so-distant future, will have to let go. Only that you make the most of them, and smile while they last. And that you never give up in the face of obstacles, but only grit your teeth smile and try harder.
Du calme, monsieur. Du calme et du courage. And the hidden laughter / Of children in the foliage.

It's called ... wait, what?

yeah shouldn't be that bad
but its known to be late
since there are no other flights coming in
usually
...
yep
thats india for u
haha
i am actually serious
there are no flights usually when the international flights arrive
cause its like 2 am
and they still make all the flights circle around
for 30 mins
yep
...
we have different ways of operating in india buddy
its called
chaos

ALL HAIL THE ROMANIAN.

Yup. Wait, wrong Romanian. Bah

Completely Unnecessary Exercise is completely unnecessary

Or not entirely completely, I guess, but pretty darn close.
Move on, nothing to see here. I hope.
Patience. Goodwill.
And a generous dose of cool, measured irony.

Exercise in Futility

Don't stop to think. Just go. Keep going.
No. That will not do.
Not while you're being rent by increasingly energetic impulses even as the pillars are crumbling into the sea.

Career, Carrera

Inherently unseparable from the rat race. Bah humbug.

Grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

Science? It's really an art.

There may be falsifiability and the scientific method and all that jazz, but those are only tools. When you have to decide what are the important and interesting questions, how to frame them, how to go about answering them; when you deal with the sheer range of parameters that can vary and have to decide just which of them really need to be controlled; when you interpret the results and build theories upon imperfect, incomplete, noisy data---then there are no hard and fast rules telling you what to do. Only the broad framework of prior knowledge, rules of thumb, and, above anything else, experience, intuition and imagination.
So no, science isn't the same as what might usually be considered the "arts" or the "humanities"---but it is no less of a creative endeavour, and there is nothing mechanical about it.

Fun fact

25ml of the colorless, odorless solution I just made could kill. Hmm.

Chronic uncertainty meets the German.

Really I don't know what I'm doing. Really.

Limerence

"It has no roots whatsoever. It looks nice. It works well in French. Take it from me it has no etymology whatsoever."

Science

If you aren't completely baffled most of the time, you're doing it wrong.

A flâneur skims Boston.

Saturday was another sweltering day, though not as bad as Friday (temperatures in Newark apparently hit a record high that afternoon. Well, well.) It didn't hurt that we spent the hottest hours of the day indoors in the air-conditioned comfort of the Museum of Science, learning that grass and apple smell really similar, trying to locate Waldo but finding only illustrated puns, and marvelling at the sheer range of diets and caloric intake around the world.
Sometime in the afternoon there was lunch at the museum cafe, which had a great panoramic view over the Charles River. The Charles was a recurrent point of reference over the weekend as we crossed back and forth over it along Storrow Drive, first to listen to Elaine gushing over this year's IMO results over dinner, and then to visit the MIT Museum the next day. They hadn't changed any of their exhibits since winter, but they didn't seem any less cool or interesting to me. Technology: it's awesome.

The heatwave had subsided by Sunday, and it was excellent weather for a walk down Mass Ave, by Beacon Hill and through the Public Garden to Chinatown. Far better than the snowy and biting cold that we walked the Freedom Trail in earlier this year. Ambling through the Public Garden after a tasty and very filling bowl of phở bò, watching the crimson and violet sunset over the Boston skyline and people lounging on the lawns enjoying the weather, ZM's comment that this was "such a liveable city" seemed almost undisputable.
Though I couldn't help but wonder---would any of us ever actually live here; truly "belong" here, whatever that may mean? Or would we never be more than mere visitors? And if so, is that reason to be sad? Or is it just the way the world is, something of no import or practical consequence?

Anyway, back to New Jersey now. Cheers.