Aug 25, 2023

Carlo Cipolla's Laws of Stupidity


 

 

"By creating a graph of Cipolla's two factors, we obtain four groups of people.

Helpless people contribute to society but are taken advantage of by it;  

Intelligent people contribute to society and leverage their contributions into personal benefits;  

Stupid people are counterproductive to both their and others' interests;  

Bandits pursue their own self-interest even when this poses a net detriment to societal welfare. An additional category of ineffectual people either exists in its own right or can be considered to be in the center of the graph."

Sep 5, 2022

Windows 11 bootable usb installer from MacOSX

  • Use 'Disk Utility' application to format the USB drive in MS-DOS (FAT) format
  • Download the windows ISO file from the Windows website or other source
  • Extract the ISO and copy all but the 'sources' directory into your USB
  • Create a 'sources' directory into your USB and copy everything from the ISO's 'sources' directory but 'install.wim'
  • Install Homebrew in your Macbook. Homebrew is a missing package manager for macOS (or Linux)
  • Use Homebrew to install wimlib
    • $brew install wimlib
  • Use wimlib to split 'install.wim' into two files (install.swm and install2.swm) as follows into your installer USB:
    • $wimlib-imagex split /Volumes/.../sources/install.wim /Volumes/.../sources/install.swm 4000
  • Plugin the USB into your PC and select the boot option (by hitting the key F9/F11/ALT)
  • Follow the click and install rest of the process to successfully install Windows 11 into your PC

 

 

Reference: Create bootable Windows 11 installation USB from macOS

Sep 3, 2022

Eros and Psyche

 

Eros  -- mythical son of Penia (goddess of poverty) and Porus (god of wealth) -- forever in need and forever being pursued.

Jul 22, 2022

Crown Shyness

 



"The Mind-Body Problem" - Rene Descartes

Our mind-body problem is not just a difficulty about how the mind and body are related and how they affect one another. It is also a difficulty about how they can be related and how they can affect one another. Their characteristic properties are very different, like oil and water, which simply won’t mix, given what they are.

Mind: What is characteristic of a mind, Descartes claims, is that it is conscious, not that it has shape or consists of physical matter. Our bodies are certainly in space, and our minds are not, in the very straightforward sense that the assignation of linear dimensions and locations to them or to their contents and activities is unintelligible. 

Body: According to Descartes, matter is essentially spatial, and it has the characteristic properties of linear dimensionality. Things in space have a position, at least, and a height, a depth, and a length, or one or more of these. Mental entities, on the other hand, do not have these characteristics. 

Objection to mind-body problem: The difficulty, however, is not merely that mind and body are different. It is that they are different in such a way that their interaction is impossible because it involves a contradiction. It is the nature of bodies to be in space, and the nature of minds not to be in space, Descartes claims. For the two to interact, what is not in space must act on what is in space. Action on a body takes place at a position in space, however, where the body is. Apparently Descartes did not see this problem. 

  • Our minds are not physically connected to our bodies! How could they be, if they are nonphysical? That is the point whose importance Princess Elisabeth and Gassendi saw more clearly than anyone had before them, including Descartes himself.
     

Significance of the problem: That this straightforward test of physicality has survived all the philosophical changes of opinion since Descartes, almost unscathed, is remarkable.

 

Reference: Descartes and the discovery of "The Mind-Body Problem"

 

Carlo Cipolla's Laws of Stupidity

    "By creating a graph of Cipolla's two factors, we obtain four groups of people. Helpless people contribute to society but are...