06/2019

Good evening everyone!

This is a reminder about our lab dinner to be held on Sunday June 2nd at 7:30PM.

The dinner will be held at Whiskey’s located at 885 Boylston Street Boston MA, 02116.

Please bring your ID to the restaurant.

.

Business | German beer

Pure, cheap and a bit dull

Brash Americans plan to froth up Germany’s staid brewing business

THE dirndl-clad waitress bringing huge mugs to Lederhosen-wearing revellers at Oktoberfest is an image that, like none other, shows how central beer is to German culture. The national brewers’ association declares Germany “European Champion”. It brewed 94.4m hectolitres last year, beaten only by China, America and Brazil.

But the truth is that Germans are going off their ale. At unification in 1990, annual consumption averaged 148 litres per head; last year it was just 107 litres. Instead, they are turning to wine, which has a higher status. Connoisseurs think there is another reason for falling sales: that so many German beers are bland and indistinguishable. The country has many tiny breweries whose ales can only be had locally. Some, like the smoked beers of Bamberg in Franconia, are distinctive.

.

BUSINESS

Craft Beer Is the Strangest, Happiest Economic Story in America

Corporate goliaths are taking over the U.S. economy. Yet small breweries are thriving. Why?

By Derek Thompson

The monopolies are coming. In almost every economic sector, including television, books, music, groceries, pharmacies, and advertising, a handful of companies control a prodigious share of the market.

The beer industry has been one of the worst offenders. The refreshing simplicity of Blue Moon, the vanilla smoothness of Boddingtons, the classic brightness of a Pilsner Urquell, and the bourbon-barrel stouts of Goose Island—all are owned by two companies: Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors. As recently as 2012, this duopoly controlled nearly 90 percent of beer production.

.

$60k for 30 acres in Maine

.

hopped up out of bed turned my swag on, took a look in the mirror

.

Homeostasis is driven by cellular memory
Allostasis by limbic memory
It’s all memory

.

I wonder who funds such studies. They are not particularly insightful & do no push our knowledge forward. For some of us in the trenches, we already know that our 9 mile daily runs (1000 calories in 80 minutes) are far from sustainable in the long run — but for less fancy reasons: the knees, sheens, and feet ache and need rest every now and then!

Six of the boys who share their Apple-Watch-documented workouts via iCloud face similar challenges & we all agree that running is way too rough on the feet, sheens, and knees. Thus the need for swimming and weightlifting, which stress different muscle groups.

So it is the physical wear & tear that is the rate-limiting-step, not the metabolic & calorific one. And we also witness this with marathon runners. They all need many days of physical recovery after the 26 mile run. Premiership Soccer players may also agree that it’s the sheer physical stress on the bones and muscles that limits how much one can do — way before we approach the 4000/day calorie work out.

.

σμψ𝛿κ
Five-Greeks

.

nitimur in vetitum — We strive for the forbidden 🚫

.

Thereafter, it was open warfare. Nietzsche passed up no chance to mock Wagner’s sentimental return to the Christian faith, and Cosima tried to pretend that Nietzsche was dead. Nietzsche was the weaker party, ever more sick in mind and body, and unable to avoid hoping that Cosima would rescue him by turning against her husband and his memory. It was useless. As the Wagner cult became more intense after the Master’s death, Cosima found her role as its high priestess. Nietzsche was at best an inconvenience, at worst a threat. Ariadne would neither deliver Theseus from the Minotaur nor accept this second Dionysus alongside her departed Dionysian lover. Intolerable as Cosima was, it is hard to see what she could in fact have done for Nietzsche; still, one flinches at the last words of this book: to his guardians at the German asylum, Nietzsche declared, ‘’It was my wife Cosima Wagner who brought me here.’’

.

“At bottom all I had done was to put one of Stendhal’s maxims into practice: he advises one to make one’s entrance into society by means of a duel. And how well I had chosen my opponent—the foremost free-thinker of Germany!”

Excerpt From
Ecce Homo
Friedrich Nietzsche
https://books.apple.com/us/book/ecce-homo/id1369792621
This material may be protected by copyright.

.

The poppy’s paradox is a profoundly human one: If you want to bring Heaven to Earth, you must also bring Hell. In the words of Lenny Bruce, “I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God.”

.

NMDA/GABA
mu-, delta-, and kappa-receptors
5HT, NE, Dopamine

.

Christianity may be ok between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to children. Discuss!

.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astonishing_Hypothesis

.

🐘

Funniest Nietzsche line:

When I then calculate from that day forward, the sudden production of the book under the most unlikely circumstances in February 1883—the last part out of which I quoted a few lines in my preface was written precisely in the hallowed hour when Richard Wagner died in Venice—I come to the conclusion that the period of gestation covered eighteen months. This period of exactly eighteen months might suggest at least to Buddhists that I am in reality a female elephant.

.

Fuck you guys, I’m going home! Eric Cartman

By creating a “self” and “other” distinction, we show that right AI and dACC are involved in processing the salience of being judged by others

we performed quantitative reverse inference analyses to explore the best general psychological account of the dACC function P(Ψ process|dACC activity). Results clearly indicated that the best psychological description of dACC function was related to pain processing—not executive, conflict, or salience processing.

.

Kawhi Leonard, the same player who put a nail in the coffin of LeBron’s stint in Miami five years ago, did the exact same to the Golden State Warriors.

They went out like champions, like true warriors, like, to borrow Steve Kerr’s phrase, “f-cking giants.”

.

Int J Psychoanal. 1996 Dec;77 ( Pt 6):1127-68.
The empire of the ear: Freud’s problem with music.
Cheshire NM1.
Author information

1
Arfon Mental Health Centre, Bangor.
Abstract
Freud’s difficulty in appreciating music, even though he seems to have been one of Charcot’s ‘auditifs’ and had given auditory imagery a central place in his psychology, is re-examined in the light of his dealings with various distinguished musicians, and with special reference to the musical career of ‘Little Hans’. The author argues that Freud’s exaggeration of his difficulty, combined with his ability to enjoy certain operas and his use of musical metaphors in the context of theory and therapy, confirms his own intuition of a conflict rather than a simple deficiency. This conflict is examined with reference to the theories of Eissler and of Vitz, and in the light of his own interest in classical Greek culture and in the nature of Art. Since opera was perhaps the only form of music that Freud could readily enjoy, the relation between words and melody in that genre is addressed. The significance for Freud of the specific works and passages that he mentions throughout his writings is examined in the light of some of his own theoretical concepts: (a) with special reference to ‘oedipal’ features, to the dynamics of ‘eros’ and ‘thanatos’, and to the balance between the ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ processes in artistic creativity; and (b) as exemplified in his favourite operas ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, ‘Don Giovanni’, ‘Carmen’ and ‘The Mastersingers’. The parts played, in his problem with music, by his envy of the artist’s intuitive talent for seduction and by his own ‘acoustic atrophy’ are also considered. He is defended against the recent charge that, in order to avoid having to cede primacy to others on points of psychology, he deliberately misrepresented how much he knew about music.

He did the same with regards to Nietzsche (i.e., deliberately misrepresented how much he knew about Nietzsche’s works)

.

— Reality vs. Idealism 
— Dionysian vs. Apollonian
— Teleology vs. Deontology
— Becoming vs. Being
— Change vs. Permanence 
— Pre-Socratic vs. Socratic 
— Trenches vs. Administration
— Process vs. Variance 
— Bayesian vs. Frequentist 
— My tribe vs. Theirs
— Story teller vs. Name-dropper
— Verbs vs. Adjectives
— Pathways vs. Coefficients
— Nature vs. Imagination
— PNS vs. Cortex

x

— Human Being’s emerged 2 million years ago
— Their environment has changed since then
— Environment will continue to change!
— Yet they are still “Being” what they were back then
— Infrastructure-wise so to speak
— What were adaptations then might now be maladaptations
— So Becoming can be supported from this perspective
— Need technology that can “support” our infrastructure
— As we usher in purpose-driven, teleological, evolution
— Or maybe only for the benefit of robots?
— This was the wisdom of Heraclitus 
— It is the wisdom of Engineers
— Lost on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle
— But engineering brings it all back 
— Hence forth I am an engineer
— 2019/06/14 8.36am

.

Hero of the month
2019/6

Lou Andreas-Salomé

x

Finest menage a trois:

Left to right, Andreas-Salomé, Rée and Nietzsche (1882)

x

The immoral woman archetype?
Serial rejector of suitors?
Collective unconscious

.

It’s been quiet an ache
Going about trying to bake
A tasty-sweet poetry cake
For you to partake

And for all my pains
There’s hardly been any gains
Except for what here reigns
Poetry with no brains

Forgive me if you sleep
As you read these rhymes
Pardon me if you weep
For the poetry of these times

I am but a doctor
A poet with no mentor
About to enter
Something beyond my mental

.

— question:
— date someone for 6 years
— and you have measly 4 mutual friends?

.

2ra is at 32 weeks
2019/06/16

.

#277 Happiness and culture.— The sight of the surroundings of our childhood moves us deeply: the garden-house, the church with the graveyard, the pond and the wood — we see all these with a sense of suffering. We are seized with pity for ourselves, for what have we notion through since those days! And here everything is still standing there so motionless and eternal: it is only we who are so different, so affected; we even rediscover certain people upon whom time has whetted its tech as little as it has on an oak tree: peasants, fishermen, forest-dwellers — they are the same.— To be moved and to feel self-pity in face of lower culture is a sing of a higher culture; from which it follows that happiness at any rate has not been augmented by the later. He who wants to harvest happiness and contentment from life has only to avoid acquiring a higher culture

.

Free spirit vs. fettered spirit?
Slave to the rhythm of good & bad?
Or to the humdrum of happily-ever-after?

.

They never met and had little good to say about each other. Wagner tended to be circumspect on the subject of Verdi. But in an 1899 interview with a German newspaper Verdi, then 86, called Wagner “one of the greatest geniuses” who left treasures of “immortal worth.” Verdi added that as an Italian, he could not claim to “understand everything” in Wagner. But before “Tristan und Isolde,” he declared, “I stand in wonder and terror.”

.

Freedom in fetters — a princely freedom. That is what Nietzsche thought of Chopin, “the inimitable Pole,” and Raphael. Both had princely nobility in respect of convention, admitted these without dispute, but did so playing and dancing in these fetters like the freest and most graceful spirits — and did so, moreover, without turning them to ridicule.

Although I agree entirely with this characterization, to me it seems that Mozart’s piano concertos are the quintessence of “dancing in these fetters”: the concerto form in the able hands of this maestro of the symphonic & operatic forms — he holds the distinction of becoming the only maestro of both instrumental and theatrical music, which becomes evident in the piano concerto where the two “spirits” [fettered and unfettered] meet — transports us right back to the grandeur and splendor of an 18th century Viennese royal court, just as Haydn or Salieri would.

The piano solo respects this elegant setting in melody and rhythm — born to ethiquette, as it were — but betrays a vibrance and sure-footedness that is without a doubt “the fettered, yet free spirit”. The orchestra plays the role of 18th century Viennese society. As a matter of course, the piano solo is both literally and figuratively Herr Mozart in all his princely freedom, fettered in “having to endure the customs of the Castle where a prince must reside,” yet also unfettered in “making the most of what he can with servants and the help who work but not live in the Castle”.

“When one considers the somnambulistic surefootedness and grace with which Mozart masters the vocal and the instrumental, mass and opera, quartet and concerto, one’s admiration grows immeasurably at the phenomenon of his uniqueness as a universal musician.”

— Alfred Einstein

.

Amadeus

loved of God

.

John 3:16

.

Gracias señor

.

Jw.org (website)

• Menu

• Publications

• Music
  Jw library (app)

Kingdom Hall
1110 Springfield Ave
Tuesday @ 7pm
Sunday @ 9am

.

— Call Tasha
— She’s Jehovah’s witness (JW)
— And is married
— But her friend!!!!
— Is totally single
— Now I gotta go to Kingdom Hall!!
— WTF????
— Tasha has my number
— I also got here
— Likelihood she’ll call me
— For her friends sake
— who knows??

.

Sfumato— drink
Dark, stout-like??

.

R bar has won me 💯
But, with regard to craft beer,
Max’s #1

.

Life turns out to be painful 😖
From eternally recurrent smoothness
Or eternally recurrent randomness
The one leads to existential pangs
While the other to physical pain

x

A resilience emerges with the later
Yet with the former none ever does
So one is bound for stronger will
But the other for ill-will 🤒
Existential pangs are numbed

x

Religion and group membership
Opioids (including bad art)
Rare occasions find relief in hedonism
Most rituals of dubious merit: work, school Politics and engineering misses all this

.

Apollonian & Dionysian
— It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
— It was the age of existential pain, it was the age of physical pain
— It was the age of predicaability, it was the age of unpredictability
— It was the age of humdrum, it was the age of adventure; therefore,
— It was the age of suffering, it was the age of suffering

.

it “did not occur to me that you could have the supreme vice, shallowness.”

.

Salience — my word of the year 2019!
My new-year resolution was “express my SELF fully”
From a perspective of salience, that means abdicate from all princely duties :-)
This is a call to action: go out and discover what excites your senses!
And repeat this every day since every end is a beginning

.

My heroes of 2019

1.Robert Sapolsky
2.Immaculate Bamuturaki
3.Lou Andreas-Salomé
4.Brien Masters

.

Taps nearby

Peabody heights 0.4mi 4/5 xxx
R. house 1.0mi 1/5 xxx
Growler — Rotunda 1.3mi
Five and dime ale house 1.4mi
De Klein Duivel 1.5mi
The Brass Tap 1.7mi

Smaltimore 3.5mi

.

Men face reality, that’s why they have to drink

.

Is scientific scholarship perhaps only a fear and an excuse in the face of pessimism, a delicate self-defence against—the Truth? And speaking morally, something like cowardice and falsehood? Speaking unmorally, a clever trick? Oh, Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? Oh you secretive ironist, was that perhaps your—irony?

.

Allan Massie
Perhaps my closest colleague
Define “close” in whichever way
But certainly: person-years “together”

x

Gracias Señor

.

Peabody Heights Brewery
— Unforgivable Curses
(Belgian Triple)

— Barrel Aged POST
(Imperial Stout w/Reeses and kit kat)

.

Now am I in Arden when I was home I was happier

.

I fully expect to be waiting tables for a good portion of my life, but I’m happy when I’m acting, and that’s a feeling not everyone can have in their life so easily :-)

.

For a while, Somali piracy attracted unprecedented public attention, displacing images of peglegs, eye patches and a dreadlocked Johnny Depp from the popular imagination. Whereas buccaneers in the Gulf of Guinea and South-East Asia stole cargo, the Somalis seized crews and often the ships themselves, hauling them back to the ungoverned coast of their lawless state. A fifth of the world’s commercial shipping passes through the Gulf of Aden, a body of water flanked by failed states—Somalia and Yemen. In 2011 the imb reported 236 attempted attacks. The pirates were raking in an average of almost $5m in ransom per ship, according to One Earth Future (oef), an ngo.

.

Vanguard Institutional Target Retirement 2045 Institutional