This is a part of the homework feature of my blog, which is an ongoing conversation with my mate S.F.

Lately I’ve been learning about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I would recommend you take the time to listen to Lex Fridman interview Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

I read RFK Jr’s new book: The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. He is obviously deeply paranoid, and I’m not sure what truth he has.

Check out He Huang on Australia’s Got Talent 2022. So funny.

Steve the super villain says Switch to Linux.

The Sex Pistols song about abortion is Bodies.

The guy behind Designing the Mind is Ryan Bush, who I believe is from North Carolina, USA.

Recently I read The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. It’s about a wise man being questioned about various topics by the villagers in a village. It’s good! It’s full of good quotes, but one favorite was from the beginning:

“But as he descended the hill, a sadness came upon him, and he thought in his heart: How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city. Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret? Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache. It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands. Nor is it a thought I leave behind me, but a heart made sweet with hunger and with thirst.”

The book about positive thinking that I read recently is Magic Words and How to Use Them. It’s short and cheap and I would recommend it, if you can find some time for more reading! Here’s a quote from its philosophy chapter which is in the back of the book:

And now, we move on to the most exquisitely beautiful aspect of telling a positive story. Remember, the thinking mind’s job is to speak, comment, categorise and judge. And it does so every second that it is active. So, when we think about the world, we are always judging or categorising it. But, here’s the thing: reality, true reality, contains no judgement. Reality contains no opinions, no right and wrong. Reality just is. Judgement and categorisation are functions only of the thinking mind. All notions of good and bad, right and wrong, wanted and unwanted, are created by the thinking mind. All categories and concepts—even those we use for apparently physical objects like tables and chairs—do not exist in the outside world. If reality just is, it follows that it cannot be categorised or judged in any truthful or accurate way by the mind. This means all judgments, all categories, and all stories, positive and negative must be, to a certain extent, false. Yes, that’s right! All stories are false. However, it does seem to me that positive stories are truer than negative ones.

As I mentioned I recently read Man’s Search For Meaning: The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust. I suppose everyone should read this book, but it’s liable to make one sad. :( In the first half of the book Viktor Frankl describes his experience in Auschwitz. In the second half of the book he explains his theory of Logotherapy: which is “founded upon the belief that striving to find meaning in life is the primary, most powerful motivating and driving force in humans.” Here are two quotes from Viktor Frankl we should send to the Human “Resources” department:

“Since Kant, European thought has succeeded in making clear statements about the true dignity of human beings: Kant himself, in the second formulation of his categorical imperative, said that everything has its value, but man has his dignity – a human being should never become a means to an end. But already in the economic system of the last few decades, most working people had been turned into mere means, degraded to become mere tools for economic life. It was no longer work that was the means to an end, a means for life or indeed a food for life – rather it was a man and his life, his vital energy, his ‘man-power’, that became this means to an end.”

And:

“Under the influence of a world which no longer recognized the value of human life and human dignity, which had robbed man of his will and had made him an object to be exterminated (having planned, however, to make full use of him first—to the last ounce of his physical resources)—under this influence the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values.”

Here ChatGPT explains Linear vs. Switched Mode power supplies. Basically linear supplies are built with transformers and have nice clean output but are expensive and inefficient (they lose energy to heat); whereas switched mode supplies are built with transistors and are cheaper to make and more energy efficient, but their output can be slightly noisy due to the high-frequency switching.

A bridge rectifier is four rectifying diodes connected together and used to convert AC voltage into DC. There’s a good explanation about how these work over here: Full Wave Bridge Rectifier + Capacitor filters + half wave rectifier.

We discussed Severance the TV series. I should check that out.

I found a transcription of Revelations by Bill Hicks, which ends with:

“Shut him up. We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real.”
Just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn’t matter because: It’s just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defences each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.

We should remember we don’t want to be “amplifying a bullshit signal and making a shit sandwich”.

Here is a fun comic from SMBC about consciousness:

The Desiderata is a beautiful poem.

The track is Cannonball by The Breeders. So good! Crash! I’m the last splash!

Everyone should read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance once in their life. It’s a book about “quality” and what it means.

The video editor I have been using is Kdenlive. So far so good but I don’t really know how to use it yet. Soon I’m gonna try making a time-lapse video with some footage of a tedious process, wherein I cleaned up and tested my whole 5% resistor stock.

And here is the photo of most of the networking in the lab:

It was lovely to see you, as always. Let’s do it again some time. :)