I’m having a bit of a moral dilemma dealing with Amazon merchants.
I’m certainly contributing to the demise of small brick and mortar businesses by ordering nearly everything on Amazon. This I know and accept. But to the extent I can help small businesses that do sell on Amazon, I should be happy to. Yet I find myself rarely rating products, and when emailed by the merchants following an order, I find myself only getting annoyed, and never going to rate the product. I don’t know if this is a problem with incentives or presentation on Amazon’s part, or if I am just an evil person. I wouldn’t have a problem rating the products if it were simpler and more part of my usual Amazon process. But the emails just drive me nuts.
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I’m in Singapore right now, but more on that later. I’m trying to get through some of my email backlog… Tim emailed me a month ago with a recommendation:
Have you heard of David Bohm? Physicist/philosopher, died in 1992. I think you’d be interested in his work. Listen to this summary thing and see.
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I have a deeper sense of the truth of, or more certainty of, the notion everyone is equally intelligent. (If I were high or drunk, this increased certainty may not ultimately even be because of smoking pot or drinking, for I could feasibly have arrived at this position by doing the same mental work without pot. But even then, perhaps that work would not have been performed any time soon were it not for the pot.) It’s possible this question might already be answered one way or the other, and I could gain that knowledge simply by reading the right things. But I admitted to myself I don’t have certainty one way or the other, and even knowing the information may already exist, instead of trying to look it up, I reasoned out cases for and against with Mike. After spending several hours in thought experiments, and even without totally proving to myself the truth of the notion, or totally disproving it, I can confidently say I have more respect for the notion everyone might be equally intelligent. Which is to say I can confidently say I believe it more. I could find out tomorrow this has been decidedly proven in the negative, but right now I’m not sure being shown it is false could possibly convince me. I’m not sure it couldn’t, either, though. Perhaps I will feel differently then. Perhaps in that moment I will look back at this as a crazy hallucination, or perhaps I’ll even remember it as a dream. Or perhaps I won’t remember it at all. How can I say with certainty, then, what I am feeling now really means anything at all?
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This evening I explained what I believe about evolution, how there are no such things as discrete species (by the same logic, there are no such things as races), but rather those are arbitrary labels for a specific populations of living things who can interbreed at a specific time. When …
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This morning my friend Walter sent me a link to his cycling heat map on Strava, and it was pretty cool. Even cooler than my silly temperature + Fitbit history chart maker app, Weatherbit 
.
Update: Check out an example map from CityStrides.
This morning my friend Walter sent me a link to his cycling heat map on Strava, and it was pretty cool. I figured there must be a web service that creates these based on Runkeeper data, so I Googled "runkeeper heatmap." Apparently there isn't a readymade service, but the top result gave me exactly what I needed to do it myself.
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