People like to say to and about cancer patients: "How brave."  And "What a brave fight."  And he/she "fought cancer valiantly."   Holy mother of god.    There is no bravery.  There is only fear.  There is only pain. If we could escape this by retreating - all of us would.  Seriously, show me a coward's way out, and I will take it.   We are not brave.  We are struggling to survive. 

It was like a miracle. Three months before I started chemo, pot and pot products were legalized here in Arizona.

Perception matters very much, and it opens the window for how you would proceed toward resilience and strength.

Another poet, John Keats, recommends in his letters to a young poet that he develop a capability for living with unanswered questions. Keats calls this ‘negative capability,’ and this is what it takes to live with loved ones gone missing. This is also the way for the rest of us to stop pressuring these families to find closure.” Ms. Boss: Yes. We just have to stop pressuring people to get over it. It’s cruel, actually, to do that.

“closure” is a terrible word in human relationships. Once you’ve become attached to somebody, love them, care about them — when they’re lost, you still care about them.

But my point is, that too is a meaning. The fact that it’s meaningless is a meaning, and it always will be meaningless.

I think we could help each other in society to learn how to speak to people who have missing loved ones. I think it’s perfectly good to ask them, “How long has it been?” Because they want to tell you how long it’s been, and sometimes it’s been decades.

“Do you remember that story I told you about my husband oversleeping and that it was my fault?” I said, “Yes, I remember.” And she said, “Well, he always set the alarm clock. I realized that, finally. It wasn’t my fault. He just wanted another hour to be with us.”

Most of the caregivers I have met and studied and treated are not depressed; they’re sad. They’re grieving. This should be normalized. Sadness is treated with human connection.

Well, we now know that this is not true and that human beings live with grief and, in fact, are able to live with grief.

That’s part, again, of a culture of mastery, a culture of problem solving and wanting to move on with things.

We come from culture in this country of, I think, mastery orientation. We like to solve problems. We’re not comfortable with unanswered questions, and this is full of unanswered questions.

It’s a more Eastern idea that suffering is part of life.

But, yes, the only way to live with ambiguous loss is to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time.

I believe that it is to be regretted when we reach the point at which we return to our own corners, each comforted by the fact that “we are each entitled to our own opinions.”

Take bloodthirsty, vengeful joy where you can, because the night is dark and the fight is long and there are no knights in shining armor waiting in the wings to slay the dragon at just the right moment of dramatic tension. Be spiteful. Be petty. Be rude. Spray-paint someone’s house. Grab your local senator and tar and feather them, I don’t know. Do whatever you have to do, as long as you’re doing something, as long as you’re taking hold of the world around you in a real way and yanking it in the direction of Slightly Less Terrible.

You can do a lot when you decide to be a stubborn motherfucker who refuses to die.

The work is never finished. The work will never be finished. There will never be a nice, comfortable utopia where we can rest on our laurels and sip strawberry daiquiris by the pool and trust that now things are Fine and we can all relax. Utopia is not a stable system. It doesn’t last. The best we can hope for is five minutes, an hour.

It’s about doing the one little thing you can do, even if it’s useless: planting seeds in the midst of the apocalypse, spitting on a wildfire, bailing out the ocean with a bucket. Individual action is almost always pointless.

How do you do it? How do you manage when the task before you is enormous and impossible? How do you do it? How do you go on? Here’s how you start a fire with two sticks: sheer, simple, bloody-minded obstinacy. That’s how you count the stars, build the library, and go to the North Pole. That’s how you hold the story even when it’s unraveling in your hands. You grit your teeth, and bear the pain, and keep going: One star at a time, one brick at a time, one step at a time.

Going to political protests is hopepunk. Calling your senators is hopepunk. But crying is also hopepunk, because crying means you still have feelings, and feelings are how you know you’re alive. The 1% doesn’t want you to have feelings, they just want you to feel resigned.

Hopepunk says, “No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half-full.”  YEAH, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and KIND. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion. 

The virtual can be switched on and off. You remember someone by ‘conjuring them up in your mind, on demand’. The real is very different: a person is there whether you like it or not – ‘regardless of your actions, intentions, or feelings’.

No wonder remote mountaintops are powerfully associated, in so many cultures, with epiphanies and purity: everyday life down below rarely reveals itself as conjured, as ‘virtual’. It, and I, feel real enough.

It’s aspirational porn, which serves the dual purpose of tantalizing the viewer with a life they cannot have, while making them feel like some sort of failure for not being able to have it.

the self-sampling assumption

the risk that humankind will go extinct soon has been systematically underestimated

The Doomsday argument

if we ever find the translation is dominant in a direction other than forward, we simply ignore that motion.

Most Computer Vision algorithms are not complete without a few heuristics thrown in

RANSAC. It is an iterative algorithm. At every iteration, it randomly samples five points from out set of correspondences, estimates the Essential Matrix, and then checks if the other points are inliers when using this essential matrix.

T his step compensates for this lens distortion.

For every pair of images, we need to find the rotation matrix RRR and the translation vector ttt, which describes the motion of the vehicle between the two frames.

An efficient solution to the five-point relative pose problem

our job is to construct a 6-DOF trajectory

“What’s the world resting on now, without the tortoise to hold it up?”