The post Balaji Srinivasan first appeared on Jay Gidwitz.

It’s hard not to look at the ground as you walk. To set your sights low, and keep the world spinning, and try to stay grounded wherever you are. But every so often you remember to look up, and imagine the possibilities. Dreaming of what’s out there. Before long, you find yourself grounded once again. Grounded in the sense of being homebound. Stuck on the planet Earth.

THE DICTIONARY OF OBSCURE SORROWS

dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a compendium of invented words written by John Koenig. Each original definition aims to fill a hole in the language—to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for.

ETYMOLOGY

From Greek. Depending on how you slice it, astrophe could mean a couple different things: – a/strophe would be the act of not turning, or – astro/phe, the act of turning to the stars. Reader Krokonil suggested an alternate etymology, from Greek astron “star” + atrophy, the wasting away of muscles or organs due to lack of use or trauma). “For us the stars are wasting away, because we will never reach them.”

TRANSCRIPT

It’s hard not to look at the ground as you walk. To set your sights low, and keep the world spinning, and try to stay grounded wherever you are. But every so often you remember to look up, and imagine the possibilities. Dreaming of what’s out there. Before long, you find yourself grounded once again. Grounded in the sense of being homebound. Stuck on the planet Earth.

The more you look to the sky, the more you find yourself back on Earth, confronting certain possibilities. It’s possible there are other names for our planet, that we will never know. That there are constellations that feature our sun, from an angle we’ll never get to see. That there are many other civilizations hidden beyond the veil of time, too far away for their light to ever reach us.

We dream of other worlds, and name them after our old discarded gods, and they seem almost as distant-too far to be seen with the naked eye. Only ever in artist’s renditions. Or a scattering of pixels on a monitor, with the colors tweaked to add a bit of flair.

Even our own neighborhood is impossibly vast. We’re used to showing the planets nested together-because if we drew them to scale, they’d be so far apart, they wouldn’t fit on the same page. And even our own moon, that seems to hang so close to Earth. But still so far away that all the other planets could fit in the space between them.

It’s possible our spacesuits won’t need treaded boots ever again. That one day soon we’ll tire of wandering and move back home for good. And we’ll get used to watching our feet as we walk, occasionally stopping to hurl a single probe into the abyss, like a message in a bottle. Maybe it shouldn’t matter if anyone ever finds it. If nobody’s there to know we once lived here on Earth.

Maybe it should be like skipping a stone across the surface of a lake. It doesn’t matter where it ends up, it just matters that we’re here on the shore. Just trying to have fun and pass the time, and see how far it goes.

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A collection of videos, interviews, and talks by rogue scientists, philosophers, artists, geniuses, and titans-of-industry to make you see the world with new eyes.

Naval Ravikant

More: https://medium.com/@noahmadden/navalism-quotes-perceptions-by-naval-ravikant-a5fd60ac5788

Yuval Noah Harari

More: Sapiens

Homo Deus

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Derek Sivers

More: Anything You Want

Chris Sacca

Silicon Valley has an empathy problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq18RXAVYqU&

(via https://tim.blog/2015/05/30/chris-sacca/)

Chris Sacca Book Recommendations

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

More: Anti-Fragile

Alexis Ohanian

More: Without Their Permission

John Taylor Gatto

Philip K. Dick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEohNAXLSOE

More: Books

Movies

Chris Voss

More: Never Split the Difference

Jordan Peterson

https://youtu.be/VuAOYiQ4YNM

More: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Robert Anton Wilson

https://youtu.be/K3BSNrq1OPc

More: Prometheus Rising

& More: Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything (or Old Bob Exposes His Ignorance)

Niel Gaiman

Daniel Kahneman

More: Thinking Fast, and Slow

Invisibilia

Scott Adams

Don’t Follow Your Passion:

http://blog.dilbert.com/2013/02/21/follow-your-passion/

Scott Adams

How to Learn

Josh Waitzkin

Josh Waitzkin, The Prodigy Returns (#148)

More: The Art of Learning

The Titans

Peter Thiel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXmhc68y-Qk&&feature=youtu.be

More: Zero to One

Marc Andreessen

More: Marc Andreessen Book Recommendations

Ben Horowitz

More: The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Charlie Munger

https://youtu.be/7-fe01CA3vc

More: Poor Charlie’s Almanack

Ray Dalio

More: Principles

The post An Unordered Collection of Talks by Rogue & Contrarian Thinkers first appeared on Jay Gidwitz.

Istanbul Mannequins (near the spice market) and reflections.

The post Istanbul Mannequins first appeared on Jay Gidwitz.

Most of these photos are from the Blue Mosque (Sultan Ahmed Mosque), The Hagia Sophia (Ayasofia), & the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, Turkey.

The post Istanbul Photography, Sept 4th 2013 first appeared on Jay Gidwitz.

The Six of Swords – or The Six of Blades as we’re calling it in The Dream Logic Tarot – indicates a “regretful but necessary transition, rite of passage.”

For this card we used a dagger with a damascus-style blade and a background image of clouds from the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge in NM. We also used a stain glass image from a Church in Providence of the All Seeing Eye, which I turned into a fractal with orbit traps in Adobe Photoshop.

The post The Six of Swords – The Tarot first appeared on Jay Gidwitz.

More New Mexico Landscapes taken while visiting family.

The Rio Grande Gorge bridge is always stunning — I cannot even imagine what the Grand Canyon must be like.

The post Taos – New Mexico Landscapes first appeared on Jay Gidwitz.