To Keep Warm By Sandy_Vdo On Flickr.

Take your clairvoyance and apply it to your life in the physical, Presumptuous half-hearted homunculus, Self-destruction is the power without knowing what the function is.

Felipe Andres Coronel

Marriage of decay and awakening.

The main response by the authors in defense is that genetic diversity is a ‘proxy variable.’ This is a common assertion, but I find it really infuriating. I happen to drink coffee most days, which correlates with my happiness. So coffee consumption is a ‘proxy’ for my happiness. Therefore, I can put it in a regression and predict the relationship between my happiness and the amount of times I go to the bathroom. Ergo universal conclusions: ‘Relieving yourself improves mental well-being.’ New policy— you should relieve yourself at least two times per day in order to maintain high levels of emotional well-being.

Kyle Peyton Regarding this controversy.

You can’t ever be really free if you admire somebody too much.

Tove Jansson

Leo Piron (Belgian, 1899-1962), Paysage hivernal avec moulin [Winter landscape with windmill]. Canvas, 41 x 50 cm.

Human cognition is only one species of intelligence, one with built-in impulses like empathy that colour the way we see the world, and limit what we are willing to do to accomplish our goals. But these biochemical impulses aren’t essential components of intelligence. They’re incidental software applications, installed by aeons of evolution and culture. ‘The basic problem is that the strong realisation of most motivations is incompatible with human existence,’ Dewey told me. The idea that we might have moral obligations to the humans of the far future is a difficult one to process. After all, we humans are seasonal creatures, not stewards of deep time.

Ross Anderson, Omens

Leave the dishes. Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor. Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster. Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup. Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins. Don’t even sew on a button. Let the wind have its way, then the earth that invades as dust and then the dead foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch. Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome. Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry who uses whose toothbrush or if anything matches, at all. Except one word to another. Or a thought. Pursue the authentic — decide first what is authentic, then go after it with all your heart. Your heart, that place you don’t even think of cleaning out. That closet stuffed with savage mementos. Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever, or weep over anything at all that breaks. Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life and talk to the dead who drift in though the screened windows, who collect patiently on the tops of food jars and books. Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters this ruse you call necessity.

Louise Erdrich, Original Fire: Advice To Myself