Today I see how little I knew yesterday. Tomorrow may I see how little I knew today.

A data-ist blessing: May you be a node of unusually high degree in the Prime Intellect’s Knowledge Graph.

περὶ τῆς σχολῆς

ὁ μὲν νόμος λέγει· καλὰ τὰ χαλεπά.

ὁ δὲ τοῦ πάλαι νόμος· χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά.

A Letter to the Ahedonians:

Amen, amen. Feel parsimoniously. The blessed will spend their time in thinking.

However, if you must sorrow and if you must rejoice, let it be a cosmic, quiet sorrow, and let it be a shimmering, dewdrop jubilation. Cast out your apathy like a demon glut and stenching.

Beware, beware lest your gems of yesterday become the long-lost treasures of yesteryear under a slothful watch.

When I hear that opening from Hopkins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”, I hear the twinny twee of polyphony, one voice from the pious and troubled Jesuit, the other from Zarathustra, reminding me that this one-time revery is now an indictment.

Giving up a God is no different than giving up a lover. Forsaking both injects the rest of being with “what might have been?”

The air outside was crisp today, and the drizzle went pitter pat, like it does best. In a puddle in my neighbor’s yard, a bird washed itself. I laughed, because although the puddle was in the mud, my avian neighbor didn’t seem to mind.

Integrals are like demons: once you start looking at them up close or spending any time with them personally, they are both more delightful and more terrifying than you could have imagined.

When it feels like all hope is lost, try to find a solution using a system of equations.

Bravado can be tempered in mathematics and in programming with the request, “That solution is great. Can you write it for the general case?”

A neo-scholastic reflection on Anselm’s “Et quidem credimus te esse aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit”:

The mind of God is an infinitely recursive complete graph. It contains not only every one of Leibniz’s monads, but every grouping of them and all their interrelationships - and all the groupings of those and their interrelationships, ad infinitum. The algorithmaticians shudder in terrible delight at the thought, but divine contemplation is extemporal, and God is not subject to combinatorial exhaustion.

Every being is in a set, whose power set is made into a complete graph. That complete graph’s nodes and edges contain all beings and all relationships between them. But it merely encompasses the moment of creation and is but the foundation for the next such Ur-graph. Every grouping and every relationship is compared again to every other, and the children birthed of these divine reflections enter into their place in the subsequent stages of the logical drama that gives the world bloom.