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Thoughts In the Stream

A Confluence of Stoicism, Zen, and a Spartan Ethos.

  • Mind
    • Politics
      • Columbus Day Is Obsolete
      • Do We Think At All?
      • New Logic in the Trump Era
      • Sitting Ducks
      • Global Warming and Capitalism
      • History Repeats
      • Republican Angst
      • Republican Fantasies
      • Failing one another
      • Faust Knew Better
      • Faust Knew Better
      • Not Tragic
      • Naive or Stupid
      • COVID and GDP
      • Trump and the Courts
    • Personal
      • Southward Equinox
      • Sitting
      • Dukkha and God
      • The Enchiridion
      • Happy New Day
      • Coalescing Thoughts
      • Our Backyard is a Carryout for Hawks
    • Covid
      • Delta
      • COVID Thoughts
      • A Year of COVID
    • Lunch Out
  • Body
    • Mind on Body
      • Intensity
      • Evolutionariy Normal
      • Outdoors
      • Toughness
      • Black Ice
    • Health
      • Sarcopenia
      • It’s 72 Hours, Stupid
      • Taxonomy of Processed Food
        • WHO Director-General Margaret Chan Quote
      • Extreme Weight Loss and Exercise
      • Magic Number
    • Workout Logs
      • Exercise Log
      • Lifting Log
    • Running
    • Strength Training
    • New Strength Training Tweak
  • Chez Denise
    • Today, We Splurged
    • October 30, 2021 A Day in the Life
  • Technology
    • Interesting Python Idioms
    • Facebook vs. Blogspot vs. WordPress (Fairy) vs. Joomla
  • Photos
    • Colorado 2017
    • On the Road to Kantishna
    • Various Photos
  • Delusion

Category: Mind

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  • Mind
Technology

Close Call: PayPal-based Scam

December 11, 2022December 11, 2022

I had a scare on PayPal recently. I have just a few accounts that I consider very high value. PayPal is one of them. I

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Human Experience Log Nature Running Strength Training

Body Log

July 7, 2022December 6, 2022

I missed my run on Tuesday and spent the rest of the week trying to catch up against commonly accepted running advice. I wound up

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Natural Language Tool Kit Python

Interesting Python Idioms

January 20, 2022November 20, 2022

The DataFrame apply() Function An example using Natural Language Tool Kit moby_raw: is text from nltk.collectionsThe first assignment of sentences results in a string list

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Mind

Classification of Text

September 29, 2022September 30, 2022

Text Classification supervised learning: machines learn from past instances. training phase: information is gathered, and a model is built. inference phase: model is applied. unlabeled

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Mind

mathjax test

September 29, 2022September 30, 2022

this is a test Some text: \[ A_{2\times2} = \left[ {\begin{array}{cc} a_{11} & a_{12} \\ a_{21} & a_{22} \\ \end{array} } \right] \] some more

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Human Experience Mind

What Is the Risk?

April 23, 2022April 23, 2022

As mask mandates are canceled, my wife and I are wondering just what is the real risk out there. The per 100,000 rates on the CDC do not tell me much. I wanted to know how these numbers compared with the U.S. significant health death rates due to heart disease, cancer, injuries, strokes, etc.

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Human Experience

Tragedy in the East

February 26, 2022March 7, 2022

3/7 I realized today that COVID and Ukraine are the defining moments for Gen Z as they grow into adults. Defining moments are always ones

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Human Experience Mind Social Media

americancanary.org

February 18, 2022February 18, 2022

Little thought gems from americancanary.org and my italicized replies.

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Human Experience Mind Politics

The Daily on 1/31/2022, Dr. Fauci

January 31, 2022February 2, 2022

Interesting exchange between Michael Barbaro and Dr. Anthony Fauci on  The Daily, Jan. 31, 2022: Michael Barbaro: “Aren’t the covid cautious fighting their own war

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Mind Running

1/22-23/22 Mental Toughness

January 23, 2022January 24, 2022

Ok, so maybe it was a little tough getting out there yesterday. It was 17 F with a wind chill of 7 F. I was

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Getting older Human Experience Mind

Shoveling Snow is Exercise Too

January 18, 2022January 18, 2022

Before After

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Body Getting older Human Experience Philosophy Running

Outdoors

January 16, 2022January 17, 2022

For me, the transformation began at 49, when I started my quest for that first marathon. To some extent, it was a rebirth or a

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Human Experience

2021 Solstice

December 27, 2021December 27, 2021

Our daughter and son-in-law had a luncheon with us on the 25th. My wife and I are not Christians, so the holiday trappings have only

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Mind

Colorado 2017

December 24, 2021December 24, 2021

Some photos from our 2017 trip to Colorado. We flew into Albuquerque and planned to drive through Colorado from the south to Denver. Along the

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Mind

Facebook vs. Blogspot vs. WordPress (Fairy) vs. Joomla

December 13, 2020December 24, 2021

Facebook is, of course, the most highly integrated. It exists primarily as an advertising platform but also allows its company to harvest extensive data about

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Mind Technology

Various Photos

February 6, 2021December 24, 2021

Photos are moments in frozen moments in time. Old photos show us how transient, and eventually meaningless, life is. There comes a time when everyone

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Mind Running

Extreme Weight Loss and Exercise

December 18, 2021December 19, 2021

The December 15, 2021 issue of the New York Times ran an interesting article, “How Exercise Affects Metabolism and Weight Loss,” which reports on newly

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Mind

Big American Lie

December 15, 2021December 15, 2021

Americans have a dangerously inflated view of their own health care system. Our politicians lie to us and leverage our reptilian tribal brains by telling

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Mind Running

Fire Ball

December 14, 2021December 14, 2021

It was there for just a couple of seconds just above the northern horizon, a fireball with a tail. As it plummeted downward, perpendicular to

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Mind

Republicans Must Hate Seniors

December 13, 2021

Today the U.S. surpassed 800,000 Covid related deaths. This was not surprising to me. What surprised me was that 600,000 of these deaths were among

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Mind

Maybe this is the one we all get.

December 13, 2021

Reuters reported on December 10 that of 43 of the cases of Omicron identified in the U.S., 34 of them were in fully vaccinated people,

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Mind

We Are Failing as a Nation. We Are Failing as a Species.

November 16, 2021November 16, 2021

Global warming is unabated. The fourth wave of COVID infections beginning in July 2021was completely discretionary: an epidemic of the un-vaxxed. It is still amazingly

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Human Experience Mind Running

2021

November 16, 2021

2021 was not the best of years for me. During the 2020 lockdown, I flourished using the time off to work out and study data

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Human Experience Mind Nutrition

October 30, 2021 A Day in the Life

November 4, 2021November 7, 2021

We decided to memorialize the meals of Saturday, October 30, 2021, since it began with a breakfast that is unusual for us.

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Mind Nutrition

Today, We Splurged

November 6, 2021November 6, 2021

Breakfast this morning was a bit more elaborate. Whole whipped eggs with parmesan cheese and spinach. Hash browns made from fresh, whole potatoes. Morning Star

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Mind Politics

Columbus Day Is Obsolete

October 12, 2021October 12, 2021

Christopher Columbus and I have history. In the mid-1970s, while sitting over lunch in a villa overlooking Santa Margherita, I remarked that Columbus had apparently

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Mind

Do We Think At All?

September 29, 2021October 2, 2021

I see these arguments come from the Left and the Right, people with no advanced education and people with liberal arts or engineering degrees. The

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Human Experience

Southward Equinox

September 25, 2021September 27, 2021

One quarter remains.

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Human Experience

Sitting Ducks

August 25, 2021September 22, 2021

Today at work I received an all-hands message asking for volunteers to staff a call center to contact Americans stranded in Afghanistan and provide them

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Human Experience Running Strength Training

Intensity

August 17, 2021August 20, 2021

Dopamine is evolution’s reward system for behaviors that increased the reproductive success of hunter-gatherers, long-distance hunting and gathering, eating high calories foods, and sex. Today we no longer persistence hunt, but regular exercisers enjoy the rewards of the long hunt.

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Mind Politics

Republican Fantasies

March 27, 2021August 17, 2021

Trump’s monumental ego, driven by proportional insecurity, prevents him from acknowledging that he was an incumbent president who lost to a rival he called “sleepy”.

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Human Experience Mind Nature Philosophy

Dukkha and God

February 19, 2021August 17, 2021

I can’t believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to me to be too local, too provincial.

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Mind Politics

Republican Angst

March 7, 2021August 17, 2021

So Republicans were catatonic at the thought of paying the middle and lower classes $24,000 during this time of financial calamity for so many. They’ve

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Mind

COVID Thoughts

May 15, 2021August 17, 2021

15% of Americans are certain they will not get vaccinated and 17% say that they probably will not.

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Mind

Evolutionarily Normal

June 13, 2021August 17, 2021

If it existed before 1500, it’s probably not a highly processed food.

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Duty/Responsibility Mind

Twenty First Century Duty

February 6, 2021August 17, 2021

When JFK spoke the words “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” an entire nation understood.

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Human Experience Mind

Delta

August 1, 2021August 17, 2021

It is painfully obvious to anyone with a background in evolutionary biology. In biology, the only thing that matters is reproduction. Given a population with

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Mind

Global Warming and Capitalism

July 3, 2021August 17, 2021
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Mind

Failing one another

August 7, 2021August 17, 2021

The cover of USA Today ran the following headline yesterday: “We are failing each other”. I have to say that I disagree. The responsibility for

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Human Experience Politics

History Repeats

August 15, 2021August 17, 2021

There’s an unhappy photo on the Associated Press of what appears to be a CH-47 Chinook hovering over Kabul evacuating diplomats. It looks distressingly like

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Body Human Experience

A Year of COVID

March 11, 2021April 24, 2021

It really is beginning to look like there is light at the end of the tunnel…..barring a really virulent COVID variant.

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Mind

Lunch Out

April 3, 2021April 24, 2021

Denise and I have eaten out for lunch most weekends since the mid-1990s. I remember well the moment in mid-March 2020 while sitting at lunch,

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Mind Philosophy

Sitting

February 14, 2021February 14, 2021

I prefer to call it sitting or sitting meditation, stripped of cultural nuances. Its root is zazen or zen, sitting meditation in Japanese. But there

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Human Experience Mind

New Logic in the Trump Era

January 23, 2021January 25, 2021

I’ve noticed two logical arguments that are repeatedly used by Trumpists, both flawed. To America’s discredit, they seem to be gaining more general use. In

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Human Experience

Not Tragic

January 7, 2021January 16, 2021

After the rape of Capitol Hill by a Trumpian mob, I wonder if this is the act of hubris that I have long instinctively expected.

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By Richard Westall - [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28397009
Human Experience Politics

Faust Knew Better

January 7, 2021January 9, 2021

I wrote a fair amount during the George W. and Obama administrations, particularly the former’s. Incensed by the stupidity of squandering the 2000 budget surplus

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Mind

Naive or Stupid

January 9, 2021January 9, 2021

Incredibly naive? Or profoundly stupid?

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Human Experience Mind Politics Python Visualization

COVID and GDP

December 29, 2020January 9, 2021

Update to this article. The Economist distilled my thinking on 12/5/2020: Two factors tied to the pandemic help account for Taiwan’s relative success this year.

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Human Experience Politics

Quote for Later

January 9, 2021January 9, 2021

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

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Mind

Coalescing Thoughts

January 4, 2021January 4, 2021

Local control of schools is a failure. People have lost, if they ever had, any ability to think analytically. Being able to posit an alternative

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