nineteen sixty-four

I listened to this today, on public radio, KUNM in Albuquerque:

"Newly Discovered 1964 MLK Speech on Civil Rights, Segregation & Apartheid South Africa"

Great speech! London, December 7, 1964. Follow the link above for video from Democracy Now!, with audio of the speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, and also the transcript of the show.

Host Amy Goodman:

In 1964, Dr. King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Days before he received that award in Oslo, Norway, Dr. King traveled to London. On December 7th, 1964, Dr. King gave a speech sponsored by the British group Christian Action about the civil rights struggle in the United States, as well as the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. The speech was recorded by Saul Bernstein, who was working as the European correspondent for Pacifica Radio. Bernstein’s recording was recently discovered by Brian DeShazor, director of the Pacifica Radio Archives.

the most important thing

Perhaps my favorite quote from Martin Luther King Jr.:

"Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?' "

yin and yang - shadow cannot exist without light

 From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang:

In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang ... describe how seemingly opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another. Many tangible dualities (such as light and dark, fire and water, expanding and contracting) are thought of as physical manifestations of the duality symbolized by yin and yang...

...Yin and yang can be thought of as complementary (rather than opposing) forces that interact to form a dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the assembled parts. Everything has both yin and yang aspects (for instance shadow cannot exist without light). Either of the two major aspects may manifest more strongly in a particular object, depending on the criterion of the observation. The yin yang (i.e. taijitu symbol) shows a balance between two opposites with a portion of the opposite element in each section.

In Taoist metaphysics, distinctions between good and bad, along with other dichotomous moral judgments, are perceptual, not real; so, the duality of yin and yang is an indivisible whole...

two wolves

Thank you, Jonquil.

the infinite

"Given infinity’s potential for troublemaking, it’s small wonder the ancient Greeks abhorred the very notion of it."




Fascinating piece on a fascinating subject: The Life of Pi, and Other Infinities

Change

One thing that you can be absolutely, 100% sure of, it's that Change will happen. Always has, always will.

You can prepare yourself for Change, even if you aren't sure what exactly will change. You can put yourself in a position to take advantage of its inevitability. You can bend Change, and benefit from it.

Or you can just kick back. Let Change run the show. And when it happens, hope that you can adjust.

But it's gonna happen, one way or another. It's up to you. Climb up on that horse and ride it, or let it ride you. Navigate that river, or let it take you where it wants to take you.

work

Ever heard of Gladwell's "10,000 hours rule" idea? You give yourself 4 or 5 years of doing something, 40+ hours per week, a job or anything else, and you're gonna get real good at it. There's a "tipping point" in there someplace where you go from being okay at something to really gettin' down with it. The idea struck a chord with me because of being able to look back at a few different jobs I've had. I knew I had the job down after a few months or a year or whatever, but 4 or 5 years of doing it takes things to a whole 'nuther level. Your cocky co-worker who's been there a whole year and half? Still a rookie, and he doesn't even realize it.

I think the same general thing applies to using Linux or shooting a basketball or writing or working on cars or anything else. Maybe it's why that degree takes four years to earn. Reminds me of this old Prince song, "Joy in Repetition," or John Wooden's book The Wizard of Westwood -- as I recall, the title of the first chapter was "Practice, practice, practice." Or, John Handy's jazz classic, "Hard Work." I tell M.A.L. that this is the old dude's secret that he wishes he understood when he was young. 

When I was around 18, I had dropped out of college and I was working on a Building & Grounds crew and the crew leader was this old, toothless dude from Oklahoma, way past retirement age, they called him "Robby." I asked him why he was still out there, driving those trucks and tractors and all that, bustin' his butt. Cat was the hardest worker of all of us. 

"Work is pleasure," he answered. Dang. Took a lot of years for the truth of that to really sink in.

change

Seems that one of the main reasons I had little problem adapting to KDE4 and GNOME 3 had to do with something I read in a book some years ago -- one of Octavia Bulter's science fiction novels. One of her characters was saying something along the lines of how "Change" is gonna happen no matter what, and the thing is to prepare yourself and position yourself to take advantage of that.

A simple idea, but it struck me as profound at the time, and I kinda decided to try to have that sort of outlook in my life.

It was an idea that was in the back of my mind when I decided to learn to use Linux. And while using Linux, it's had a lot do with my deciding to spend time with different distros, DEs, and WMs, and to try to become comfortable with .rpm distros as well as the Debian distros that I started out with.

So I wasn't all that tied down to KDE 3 or GNOME 2, and I've adapted to KDE 4 and GNOME 3 quite easily.

I really feel that my being open to Change -- preparing for its eventuality, positioning myself for it, embracing it -- has really allowed me to be more accepting than a lot of other people of the directions that KDE and GNOME have taken. So many of the comments I saw about KDE 4, and that I'm seeing about GNOME 3, are along the lines of, "It isn't KDE 3," or "It isn't GNOME 2." "It isn't what I'm used to," "It isn't like what we've been using all along."

And folks feel that the changes were forced on them. But that's usually how Change happens. Change doesn't usually stop and ask, "You gonna be okay with this?" It just comes, and if you haven't prepared yourself for it, you're gonna get blindsided by it, and you're gonna find yourself longing for the way things used to be.

shuttleworth on tribalism

Mark Shuttleworth says it all in "Tribalism is the enemy within."

I've been feeling much the same way for years.

evil

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." -- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

A Wikipedia article on the mathematician, physicist, and Catholic philosopher, Blaise Pascal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal