601 Matching Annotations
1. Jul 2018
2. arxiv.org arxiv.org
1. “pulls it back”

minor quibble, maybe this should be surrounded by parantheses

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3. Jun 2018
4. arxiv.org arxiv.org
1. Exercise1.75.Doesbù3chave a right adjointR:N!N? If not, why? If so, does itsright adjoint have a right adjoint?
2. Remark1.73.IfPandQare total orders andf:P!Qand1:Q!Pare drawn witharrows bending as in Exercise 1.72, we believe thatfis left adjoint to1iff the arrows donot cross. But we have not proved this, mainly because it is difficult to state precisely,and the total order case is not particularly general
3. x3yif and only ifdxù3e y

Maybe x and y (at least y) should be said to be natural numbers here, but then again it is fairly obvious from the context.

4. Writedzeforthe smallest natural number greater thanz2R, and writebzcfor the largest naturalnumber smaller thanz2R, e

I think both of these definitions should include "or equal to", especially given the immediate following example of x <= 3y if and only if ...

5. The preservation of meets and joins, and hence whether a monotone map sustainsgenerative effects, is tightly related to the concept of a Galois connection, or moregenerally an adjunction.
6. Galois connections between posets were first considered by Évariste Galois—whodidn’t call them by that name—in the context of a connection he found between “fieldextensions” and “automorphism groups”. We will not discuss this further,
7. In his work on generative effects, Adam restricts his attention to maps that preservemeets, even while they do not preserve joins. The preservation of meets implies that themapbehaves well when restricting to a subsystem, even if it can throw up surpriseswhen joining systems
8. n [Ada17], Adam thinks of monotone maps as observations. A monotone map:P!Qis a phenomenon ofPas observed byQ. He defines generative effects of such a mapto be its failure to preserve joins (or more generally, for categories, its failure topreserve colimits)
9. Example1.61.Consider the two-element setPfp;q;rgwith the discrete ordering.The setAfp;qgdoes not have a join inPbecause ifxwas a join, we would needpxandqx, and there is no such elementx.Example1.62.In any posetP, we havep_pp^pp.Example1.63.In a power set, the meet of a collection of subsets is their intersection,while the join is their union. This justifies the terminology.Example1.64.In a total order, the meet of a set is its infimum, while the join of a set isits supremum.Exercise1.65.Recall the division ordering onNfrom Example 1.29: we say thatnmifndivides perfectly intom. What is the meet of two numbers in this poset? Whatabout the join?

These are all great examples. I htink 1.65 is gcd and lcm.

10. These notions will have correlates in category theory, called limits and colimits,which we will discuss in the Chapter 3. For now, we want to make the definition ofgreatest lower bounds and least upper bounds, called meets and joins, precise.
11. Ifxyandyx, we writexyand sayxandyareequivalent. We call a set with a preorder aposet.
12. Example1.49.Recall from Example 1.36 that given a setXwe defineEXto be theset of partitions onX, and that a partition may be defined using a surjective functions:XPfor some setP.Any surjective functionf:X!Yinduces a monotone mapf:EY! EX, going“backwards”. It is defined by sending a partitions:YPto the compositef:s:XP
13. s

Not really a typo, but slightly confusing since s is also used for a different funciton in the same example in the following paragraph.

14. Example1.42 (Opposite poset).Given a posetπP;∫, we may define the opposite posetπP;op∫to have the same set of elements, but withpopqif and only ifqp.
15. Example1.40 (Product poset).Given posetsπP;∫andπQ;∫, we may define a posetstructure on the product setPQby settingπp;q∫  πp0;q0∫if and only ifpp0andqq0. We call this theproduct poset. This is a basic example of a more generalconstruction known as the product of categories
16. Contrary to the definition we’ve chosen, the term poset frequently is used to meanpartiallyordered set, rather than preordered set. In category theory terminology, therequirement thatxyimpliesxyis known asskeletality. We thus call partiallyordered setsskeletal posets

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5. May 2018
6. arxiv.org arxiv.org
1. aandb

typo: a_1 and _a2

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7. Aug 2017
8. queue.acm.org queue.acm.org
1. If zone reclaim is switched on, the kernel still attempts to keep the reclaim pass as lightweight as possible. By default, reclaim will be restricted to unmapped page-cache pages. The frequency of reclaim passes can be further reduced by setting /proc/sys/vm/min_unmapped_ratio to the percentage of memory that must contain unmapped pages for the system to run a reclaim pass. The default is 1 percent.

This is a percentage of the total pages in each zone. Zone reclaim will only occur if more than this percentage of pages are in a state that zone_reclaim_mode allows to be reclaimed.

If zone_reclaim_mode has the value 4 OR'd, then the percentage is compared against all file-backed unmapped pages including swapcache pages and tmpfs files. Otherwise, only unmapped pages backed by normal files but not tmpfs files and similar are considered.

Source

2. There is a knob in the kernel that determines how the situation is to be treated in /proc/sys/vm/zone_reclaim. A value of 0 means that no local reclaim should take place. A value of 1 tells the kernel that a reclaim pass should be run in order to avoid allocations from the other node. On boot- up a mode is chosen based on the largest NUMA distance in the system.

This appears to be /proc/sys/vm/zone_reclaim_mode now.

3. There has been some recent work in making the scheduler NUMA-aware to ensure that the pages of a process can be moved back to the local node, but that work is available only in Linux 3.8 and later, and is not considered mature.

Stamped2 KNL nodes are already running 3.10, so this is likely available.

4. The active memory allocation policies for all memory segments of a process (and information that shows how much memory was actually allocated from which node) can be seen by determining the process id and then looking at the contents of /proc/<pid>/numa_maps.
5. How memory is allocated under NUMA is determined by a memory policy. Policies can be specified for memory ranges in a process's address space, or for a process or the system as a whole. Policies for a process override the system policy, and policies for a specific memory range override a process's policy.
6. The main performance issues typically involve large structures that are accessed frequently by the threads of the application from all memory nodes and that often contain information that needs to be shared among all threads. These are best placed using interleaving so that the objects are distributed over all available nodes.
7. In general, small Unix tools and small applications work very well with this approach. Large applications that make use of a significant percentage of total system memory and of a majority of the processors on the system will often benefit from explicit tuning or software modifications that take advantage of NUMA.
8. The most common assumptions made by the operating system are that the application will run on the local node and that memory from the local node is to be preferred.
9. A NUMA system classifies memory into NUMA nodes (which Solaris calls locality groups).
10. Modern processors have multiple memory ports, and the latency of access to memory varies depending even on the position of the core on the die relative to the controller. Future generations of processors will have increasing differences in performance as more cores on chip necessitate more sophisticated caching.
11. A memory access from one socket to memory from another has additional latency overhead to accessing local memory—it requires the traversal of the memory interconnect first.
12. The performance differences to memory were noticeable first on large-scale systems where data paths were spanning motherboards or chassis. These systems required modified operating-system kernels with NUMA support that explicitly understood the topological properties of the system's memory (such as the chassis in which a region of memory was located) in order to avoid excessively long signal path lengths. (Altix and UV, SGI's large address space systems, are examples. The designers of these products had to modify the Linux kernel to support NUMA; in these machines, processors in multiple chassis are linked via a proprietary interconnect called NUMALINK.)

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9. eklitzke.org eklitzke.org
1. Some people think that these system calls are a good way to improve the performance of a high-performance process on a system. A common use case I’ve seen in the real world is to try to call mlockall() on a program that’s supposed to running with very high performance. The reasoning is that if the program is paged out to disk, that will reduce performance; therefore mlockall() will improve things.If you try to actually use mlockall() in this way you might run into some difficulties because most systems have a very low default ulimit on the number of pages a process can lock. With some twiddling of the default ulimits you can get this working, but perhaps it’s worth considering why the default ulimits are so low in the first place.

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10. Jun 2017
11. guillaume.martres.me guillaume.martres.me
1. Vmay only extenduniversaltraitsTraits in Scala extendAnyRefby default, so value classes cannot extend them. Traitswhich explicitly extendAnyare called universal, they do not extendAnyRefand valueclasses can extend them. Like value classes and for the same reasons, universal traitsneed to be ephemeral.
2. On line 2,xneeds to be boxed because the expected type of the expression isAnyValand primitives on the JVM do not have a common supertype.

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12. www.usenix.org www.usenix.org

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13. Mar 2017
14. diatribe.org diatribe.org
1. Exercise is often positioned as something that always lowers blood glucose; however, high-intensity exercise, such as sprinting or weight lifting, can sometimes raise blood glucose. This stems from the adrenaline response, which tells the body to release stored glucose. Often, I find this happens when I’m exercising in the morning on an empty stomach. But this is not a reason to avoid high intensity exercise – studies show it can improve blood glucose for one to three days post-exercise! Note that in some cases high-intensity exercise can also drop blood glucose very rapidly (2-3 mg/dl per minute), especially if you have insulin on board in your pump. The best way to see how individual exercise sessions affect your blood glucose is to test prior and after activity. “The Impact of brief, high-intensity exercise on blood glucose levels” (Diabetes Metab Syndr Obes 2013)

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15. jamanetwork.com jamanetwork.com
1. Findings In a meta-regression analysis of 49 clinical trials with 312 175 participants, each 1-mmol/L (38.7-mg/dL) reduction in LDL-C level was associated with a relative risk (RR) of major vascular events of 0.77 (95% CI, 0.71-0.84; P < .001) for statins and 0.75 (95% CI, 0.66-0.86; P = .002) for established nonstatin interventions that act primarily via upregulation of LDL receptor expression.Meaning These data suggest statins and nonstatin therapies that act through upregulation of LDL receptor expression are associated with similar cardiovascular risk reduction per decrease in LDL-C. The clinical value of adding specific nonstatin interventions to lower LDL-C to background statin therapy should be confirmed in appropriately powered clinical trials.

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16. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
1. In addition, the vast majority of animal studies have shown that oral administration of PS reduces the progression atherosclerosis. However, it has been recently suggested that an increase in PS plasma concentrations may increase CV risk. Evidence to support this hypothesis come mainly from observations in sitosterolemic patients who hyperabsorb PS and cholesterol and display very high levels of PS, which may be associated with a premature atherosclerosis. Some epidemiological studies in non-sitosterolemic subjects have shown a positive correlation between PS plasma levels and coronary heart disease. However, these are observational studies and some of them present major methodological bias. In addition, recent studies with a larger number of subjects have indicated, either an absence or a negative relationship between PS and the incidence of CV disease.

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17. www.marksdailyapple.com www.marksdailyapple.com
1. One way exercise can protect against atherosclerosis (and therefore heart disease) is by increasing shear stress on the arterial walls, which causes the endothelium to become less permeable (less accepting of oxidized LDL particles) and produce more nitric oxide (a potent inhibitor of LDL oxidation). You can think of exercise, then, not just as training for your muscles, but also for your arterial walls. It’s enough of an inflammatory stressor to induce an adaptive response. Of course, too much shear stress can be too inflammatory and might actually cause atherosclerosis to progress.

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18. en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
1. The most effective approach has been minimizing fat stores located inside the abdominal cavity (visceral body fat) in addition to minimizing total body fat.[46] Visceral fat, which is more metabolically active than subcutaneous fat, has been found to produce many enzymatic signals, e.g. resistin, which increase insulin resistance and circulating VLDL particle concentrations, thus both increasing LDL particle concentrations and accelerating the development of diabetes mellitus.

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19. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
1. In summary, reducing dietary saturated fat is associated with an increase in LDL-receptor abundance of magnitude similar to the decrease in serum LDL-cholesterol. Thus, an important mechanism by which reductions in dietary saturated fatty acids decrease LDL-cholesterol in humans is through an increase in LDL-receptor number.

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20. en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
1. Polyunsaturated fats protect against cardiovascular disease by providing more membrane fluidity than monounsaturated fats, but they are more vulnerable to lipid peroxidation (rancidity). The large scale KANWU study found that increasing monounsaturated fat and decreasing saturated fat intake could improve insulin sensitivity, but only when the overall fat intake of the diet was low.[1] However, some monounsaturated fatty acids (in the same way as saturated fats) may promote insulin resistance, whereas polyunsaturated fatty acids may be protective against insulin resistance.[2][3] Studies have shown that substituting dietary monounsaturated fat for saturated fat is associated with increased daily physical activity and resting energy expenditure. More physical activity was associated with a higher-oleic acid diet than one of a palmitic acid diet. From the study, it is shown that more monounsaturated fats lead to less anger and irritability.[4]

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21. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
1. In line with data in humans [8], feeding of dietary monounsaturated fat to nonhuman primates reduced LDL without lowering HDL, and in comparison to saturated and polyunsaturated fat, provided the lowest LDL to HDL ratio [9•]. On the other hand, replacement of some of the saturated fat with monounsaturated fat was associated with an even greater enrichment of LDL particles with cholesteryl oleate, a change in LDL particle composition that has been shown to confer atherogenicity [9•]. However, caution is needed in applying the results from animal experiments to humans.

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22. Aug 2016
23. milessabin.com milessabin.com
1. The stringSingleton() method of the Module object appears to be indistinguishable from a first-class function value. But the appearances are deceptive. The method isn’t free-standing: we could have used this in its body and it would have referred to the Module singleton object, even after the import. And it’s not the method which is passed to map — instead a transient function value is implicitly created to invoke the stringSingleton() method (this is a process known as eta-expansion) and it’s that function-value which is passed to map.
2. Here the method subtypePolymorphic() has no type parameters, so it’s parametrically monomorphic. Nevertheless, it can be applied to values of more than one type as long as those types stand in a subtype relationship to the fixed Base type which is specified in the method signature — in other words, this method is both parametrically monomorphic and subtype polymorphic.

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24. Jul 2016
25. arxiv.org arxiv.org
1. Ax=b

Apparently $$Ax = b$$ is not required, but is used as a technical prop in subsequent proof construction.

If no linear constraints are found, either A, b can be viewed as zero, or can be viewed as the smallest affine set that includes S. In both cases, this effectively makes the constraint trivial.

2. A

How does one go about choosing (a good) A, especially since it seems to not be necessary to have a non-trivial (A,b) pair?

3. x()=2Feas, that is,1(x)< , establishing the claim

So it appears that we don't need to get feasible points at each iteration?

Answer: correct, this is pointed out later in a couple of pages, where it is stated $$x$$ need not be feasible, but $$x'$$ will be.

4. int(dom(f))

Why isn't $$x \in dom(f)$$ sufficient?

Ah, I think it is sufficient for $$t' = f(x')$$, but we also need $$x \in int(dom(f))$$ for the subsequently mentioned subdifferentials.

5. (x0;t0)2bdy(dom(f))

Confirmed that this should be $$bdy(epi(f))$$, not $$bdy(dom(f))$$

6. because(x;t) =1(x)

Why?

7. a value we now know to be positive and nite

Where is the proof that if $$\alpha_1 (x)$$ is infinite, then $$\alpha_2 (x,t)$$ is finite?

I now see that it starts at the beginning of page 3, but without any forward reference it seems that it is being skipped.

8. Approximating2(x;t) is the same as approximating the solutionto() = 0,

Not completely clear to me why this is the case.

9. Assume eis a known feasible point contained in int(S\dom(f)).

How to pick? Perhaps a reference to strategies, or note that strategies will be discussed later.

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26. Jun 2016
27. docs.oracle.com docs.oracle.com
1. A common node transform is a translation by an integer distance, most often used to lay out nodes on the stage. Such integer translations maintain the device pixel mapping so that local coordinates that are integers still map to the cracks between pixels.

What does this mean (map to the cracks between pixels)?

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28. gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com
1. There are alternative ways to implement a game loop in JavaFX. A slightly longer (but more flexible) approach involves the Timeline class, which is an animation sequence consisting of a set of KeyFrame objects. To create a game loop, the Timeline should be set to repeat indefinitely, and only a single KeyFrame is required, with its Duration set to 0.016 seconds (to attain 60 cycles per second). This implementation can be found in the Example3T.java file in the GitHub repo.

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29. Apr 2016
30. delivery.acm.org delivery.acm.org
1. In its default configuration, the CJRS web service (either deployed as an executable jar, or a war file in a servlet container) is configured to use the SLURM JobExecutionService, and directly invokes ‘srun’, ‘sbatch’, and ‘salloc’ commands that are available on the host it is running on.A natural consequence of this is that SLURM jobs are submitted using the same user ID as owner of the CJRS web service process. For the purposes of training and demonstration, it is recommended to deploy the application so that it runs as a single, unprivileged user created specifically for the purpose of training. In theory, however, anybody who obtains the executable jar file may run it on a machine they have access to, bound to some random high port exclusive to that user, allowing it to launch SLURM jobs on their behalf via the REST API.

This will likely not be portable to Docker due to security issues; two separate users will be needed: https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/security/#docker-daemon-attack-surface

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31. docs.unrealengine.com docs.unrealengine.com
1. Remember that the auto keyword does not automatically specify a pointer/reference for you, you need to add that yourself.
2. A TSet stores a collection of unique values, similar to std::set. With the AddUnique and Contains methods, TArrays can already be used as sets. However, TSet has faster implementations of these operations, at the cost of not being able to use them as UPROPERTYs like TArrays. TSets are also do not index their elements like TArrays do.
3. Containers

I wonder if these would be good for storing metadata with prototype support (see near the end of Prototype in Game Programming Patterns).

4. Actor

Should be AActor

5. Object

Should be UObject?

6. UE_LOG(LogTemp, Log, TEXT("Found UObject named: %s"), *CurrentObject.GetName());

Should be:

UE_LOG(LogTemp, Log, TEXT("Found UObject named: %s"), *(CurrentObject->GetName()));

7. Using object iterators in PIE (Play In Editor) can lead to unexpected results. Since the editor is loaded, the object iterator will return all UObjects created for your game world instance, in addition to those that are just being used by the editor. Actor iterators work in much the same way as object iterators, but only work for objects that derive from AActor. Actor iterators do not have the problem noted below, and will only return objects being used by the current game world instance.
8. MyUObject

Shouldn't this be UMyObject?

9. You'll first notice the inclusion of "MyClass.generated.h". Unreal will generate all the reflection data and put it into this file. You must include this file as the last include in the header file that declares your type.
10. To use a UStruct, you do not have to extend from any particular class, you just have mark the struct with USTRUCT() and our build tools will do the base work for you. Unlike a UObject, UStructs are not garbage collected. If you create dynamic instances of them, you must manage their lifecycle yourself. UStructs are meant to be plain old data types that have the UObject reflection support for editing within the Unreal Editor, Blueprint manipulation, serialization, networking, etc.
11. Use inheritance when you want to customize an existing AActor or UActorComponent. Use composition when you want many different AActor types to share the functionality.

At this high level, it almost sounds as if components are a way to implement mixins in C++, though perhaps more loosely coupled in terms of class type.

12. UActorComponents have their own behaviors and are usually responsible for functionality that is shared across many types of AActors, e.g. providing visual meshes, particle effects, camera perspectives, and physics interactions. While AActors are often given high-level goals related to their overall roles your game, UActorComponents usually perform the individual tasks that support those higher-level objectives. Components can also be attached to other Components, or can be the root Component of an Actor. A Component can only attach to one parent Component or Actor, but it may have many child Components attached to itself. Picture a tree of Components. Child Components have location, rotation, and scaling relative to their parent Component or Actor.
13. Unreal Engine calls the creation of an AActor at runtime spawning. Spawning an actor is a bit more complicated than creating a normal object in the game. The reason is that an AActor needs to be registered with a variety of runtime systems in order to serve all of its needs. The initial location and rotation for the actor need to be set. Physics may need to know about it. The manager responsible for telling an actor to tick needs to know. And so on. Because of this, we have a method devoted to the spawning of an actor, UWorld::SpawnActor(). Once that actor is spawned successfully, its BeginPlay() method is called, followed by Tick() the next frame.
14. AActors have their own behaviors (specialization through inheritance), but they also act as containers for a hierarchy of UActorComponents (specialization through composition). This is done through the AActor's RootComponent member, which contains a single UActorComponent that, in turn, can contain many others. Before an AActor can be placed in a level, that AActor must contain at least a USceneComponent which contains the translation, rotation, and scale for that AActor.
• USceneComponent inherits UActorComponent
15. An AActor is an object that is meant to be part of the gameplay experience. AActors are either placed in a level by a designer or created at runtime via gameplay systems. All objects that can be placed into a level extend from this class. Examples include AStaticMeshActor, ACameraActor, and APointLight actors. AActor derives from UObject, so enjoys all of the standard features listed in the previous section. AActors can be explicitly destroyed via gameplay code (C++ or Blueprints) or via the standard garbage collection mechanism when the owning level is unloaded from memory. AActors are responsible for the high-level behaviors of your game's objects. AActors are also the base type that can be replicated during networking. During network replication, AActors can also distribute information for any UActorComponents owned by that AActor that require network support.
16. Each class that derives from UObject has a singleton UClass created for it that contains all of the meta data about the class instance. UObject and UClass together are at the root of everything that a gameplay object does during its lifetime. The best way to think of the difference between a UClass and a UObject is that the UClass describes what an instance of a UObject will look like, what properties are available for serialization, networking, etc. Most gameplay development does not involve directly deriving from UObjects, but instead from AActor and UActorComponent. You do not need to know the details of how UClass/UObject works in order to write gameplay code, but it is good to know that these systems exist.

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32. Mar 2016
33. docs.unrealengine.com docs.unrealengine.com
1. Now that our designers can call our C++ code, let us explore one more powerful way to cross the C++/Blueprint boundary. This approach allows C++ code to call functions that are defined in Blueprints. We often use the approach to notify the designer of an event that they can respond to as they see fit.

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34. Dec 2015
1. Lemma 2.5.1.14

Invoke universal property of products

2. Since ducks can both swim and fly, each duck is found twice inC, once labeled as aflyer and once labeled as a swimmer. The typesAandBare kept disjoint inC, whichjustifies the name “disjoint union.”

The disjoint union reminds me of algebraic datatypes in functional programming languages, whereas a set-theoretic union is more like a union in CS: the union has no label associated with it, so additional computation (or errors) may arise due to a lack of ready information about elements in the union.

3. the set of mothers arises as is the image of
4. facts, which are simply “path equivalences” in an olog. It isthe notion of path equivalences that make category theory so powerful.Apathin an olog is a head-to-tail sequence of arrows
5. Consider the aspectpan objectqhas››››—pa weightq. At some point in history, thiswould have been considered a valid function. Now we know that the same objectwould have a different weight on the moon than it has on earth. Thus as world-views change, we often need to add more information to our olog. Even the validityofpan object on earthqhas››››—pa weightqis questionable. However to build a modelwe need to choose a level of granularity and try to stay within it, or the whole modelevaporates into the nothingness of truth!
6. An aspect of a thingxis a way of viewing it, a particular way in whichxcan be regardedor measured. For example, a woman can be regarded as a person; hence “being a person”is an aspect of a woman. A molecule has a molecular mass (say in daltons), so “havinga molecular mass” is an aspect of a molecule. In other words, byaspectwe simply meana function. The domainAof the functionf:A—Bis the thing we are measuring, andthe codomain is the set of possible “answers” or results of the measurement.

Naïvely (since my understanding of type theory is naïve), this seems to mesh with the concepts of inheritance for the "is" relationships, and also with type-theory more generally for "has" relationships, since I believe we can view any object or "compound type", as defined here, as being a subtype of another type 'o' if one of its elements is of type 'o'. Though we have to be careful for functional mapping when thinking of aspects: we can't just say Int is an aspect of Pair(Int, Int), since this is ambiguous (there are two ints) --- we must denote which Int we mean.

7. We represent eachtype as a box containing asingular indefinite noun phrase.
8. henma1››—Af›—Bb›—nis
9. For example ifX ta,b,c,d,e,fuandX1 tb,d,euthenX1ÑXand we turn thatinto the functionX—X1given bybfi—b,dfi—d,efi—e

Flip the X and X' in X -> X'

10. Data gathering is ubiquitous in science. Giant databases are currently being minedfor unknown patterns, but in fact there are many (many) known patterns that simplyhave not been catalogued. Consider the well-known case of medical records. A patient’smedical history is often known by various individual doctor-offices but quite inadequatelyshared between them. Sharing medical records often means faxing a hand-written noteor a filled-in house-created form between offices.
11. Similarly, in science there exists substantial expertise making brilliant connectionsbetween concepts, but it is being conveyed in silos of English prose known as journalarticles. Every scientific journal article has a methods section, but it is almost impossibleto read a methods section and subsequently repeat the experiment—the English languageis inadequate to precisely and concisely convey what is being done.

This issue of reproducible science is starting to be tackled but I do believe formal methods and abstractions would go along way to making sure we adhere these ideas. It is a bit like writing a program with global state vs a functionally defined program, but even worse, since you may forget to write down one little thing you did to the global state.

12. As mentioned above category theory has branched out into certain areas of scienceas well. Baez and Dolan have shown its value in making sense of quantum physics, itis well established in computer science, and it has found proponents in several otherfields as well. But to my mind, we are the very beginning of its venture into scientificmethodology. Category theory was invented as a bridge and it will continue to serve inthat role.
13. All this time, however, category theory was consistently seen by much of the mathe-matical community as ridiculously abstract. But in the 21st century it has finally cometo find healthy respect within the larger community of pure mathematics. It is the lan-guage of choice for graduate-level algebra and topology courses, and in my opinion willcontinue to establish itself as the basic framework in which mathematics is done
14. In 1980 Joachim Lambek showed that the types and programs used in computerscience form a specific kind of category. This provided a new semantics for talking aboutprograms, allowing people to investigate how programs combine and compose to createother programs, without caring about the specifics of implementation. Eugenio Moggibrought the category theoretic notion of monads into computer science to encapsulateideas that up to that point were considered outside the realm of such theory.
15. Bill Lawvere saw category theory as a new foundation for all mathematical thought.Mathematicians had been searching for foundations in the 19th century and were reason-ably satisfied with set theory asthe foundation. But Lawvere showed that the categoryof sets is simply a category with certain nice properties, not necessarily the center ofthe mathematical universe. He explained how whole algebraic theories can be viewedas examples of a single system. He and others went on to show that higher order logicwas beautifully captured in the setting of category theory (more specifically toposes).It is here also that Grothendieck and his school worked out major results in algebraicgeometry.

I haven't studied toposes, but I can at least see how introductory algebraic geometry, i.e. the study of Groebner bases, relates to propositional logic.

16. The paradigm shift brought on by Einstein’s theory of relativity brought on the real-ization that there is no single perspective from which to view the world. There is nobackground framework that we need to find; there are infinitely many different frame-works and perspectives, and the real power lies in being able to translate between them.It is in this historical context that category theory got its start.
17. These theorems have not made theirway out into the world of science, but they are directly applicable there. Hierarchies arepartial orders, symmetries are group elements, data models are categories, agent actionsare monoid actions, local-to-global principles are sheaves, self-similarity is modeled byoperads, context can be modeled by monads.
18. No one would dispute that vector spaces are ubiquitous.But so are hierarchies, symmetries, actions of agents on objects, data models, globalbehavior emerging as the aggregate of local behavior, self-similarity, and the effect ofmethodological context.
19. I will use a mathematical tool calledologs, or ontology logs, to givesome structure to the kinds of ideas that are often communicated in pictures like theone on the cover. Each olog inherently offers a framework in which to record data aboutthe subject. More precisely it encompasses adatabase schema, which means a system ofinterconnected tables that are initially empty but into which data can be entered.
20. Agreementis the good stuff in science; it’s the high fives.But it is easy to think we’re in agreement, when really we’re not. Modeling ourthoughts on heuristics and pictures may be convenient for quick travel down the road,but we’re liable to miss our turnoff at the first mile. The danger is in mistaking ourconvenient conceptualizations for what’s actually there. It is imperative that we havethe ability at any time to ground out in reality.

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35. en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
1. After being awarded a doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) for her thesis on quantum chemistry,[31] she worked as a researcher and published several papers.

Gosh, I wonder when the United States will elect someone with an equally good analytical background.

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36. programmers.stackexchange.com programmers.stackexchange.com
1. Figuring out all subclasses of a class is called Class Hierarchy Analysis, and doing static CHA in a language with dynamic code loading is equivalent to solving the Halting Problem.

Why can't the Scala compiler give pattern matching warning for nonsealed classes/traits?

Elaboration:

one of the goals of Scala is separate compilation and deployment of independent modules, so the compiler simply cannot know whether or not a class is subclass in another module, because it never looks at more than one module.

Example: ??? When I try it, it seems to work, but this may be because everything I need is already loaded in the same compilation context. A subsequent answer seems to confirm this:

It can be done (at least for all classes known at compile time), it's just expensive. You'd completely destroy incremental compilation, because everything that contains a pattern match would effectively have to be recompiled every time any other file changed.

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37. courses.edx.org courses.edx.org
1. Note for this program, the shader directories that contain glsl shaders. These are files that are loaded and compiled by the OpenGL program at runtime and therefore must exist, but need not be part of the Makefile or project.

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38. Nov 2015
39. courses.edx.org courses.edx.org
1. Somewhat surprisingly, self-compassionate people actually take more responsibility for their actions. In one study, self-compassionate people who got neutral feedback about their speaking skills were more likely to attribute it to their personality (instead of, say, a mean observer) than people with high self-esteem. Mistakes and criticism don’t threaten them as much as they do for people who have to perform well all the time.
2. Self-esteem and self-compassion might seem like opposites, but they actually go hand in hand. Self-compassionate people tend to have higher self-esteem, and both correlate with less anxiety and depression and more happiness, optimism, and positive emotion. But the differences between the two are telling. As Neff explains it, the pursuit of self-esteem is the desire to be special or above average – and since half of us aren’t, we tend to get inflated egos and look down on other people. We may refuse to see our weaknesses and be at risk for narcissism, self-absorption, self-righteous anger, prejudice, or discrimination.
3. Perhaps the most challenging objection to self-compassion is the idea that we need an admonishing voice in our heads to spur us toward success. And we do – just not the self-critical voice that we’re all so used to hearing. Self-criticism scares us into believing that failure is unacceptable, and self-critical people tend to be more depressed, less confident, and afraid of failure. In contrast, a self-compassionate voice would motivate us with the desire for health and well-being – and we’d be more likely to listen.
4. Isn’t the point of life to change and improve, rather than just accept things the way they are and naively believe the future will be better? In fact, mindfulness and the other techniques discussed help put us in better touch with reality so we can see things clearly and act from there. And thanks to neuroplasticity, science has shown that we are able to change.
5. Routine meditators also retain more brain cells, while the rest of us lose 4% of ours as we age.
6. Mindfulness at work means noticing and examining the habits of behavior, thinking, and feeling that we’ve created. Sometimes, what appears to be a problem is only a problem because of the expectations or feelings we attach to it, not the reality itself. Healey encourages us to create some distance between ourselves and our emotions and simply observe. We can also keep an eye out for little assumptions or habits that are making us unhappy, like jumping for the phone when it rings. Finally, we can cultivate mindfulness by meditating as well as injecting it into everyday experience.
7. More mindful partners report more sexual satisfaction. More mindful students participate more. More mindful teachers burnout less. More mindful health professionals burnout less and have more self-compassion. More mindful prisoners are less angry, hostile, and moody. More mindful people with post-traumatic stress disorder have less symptoms of trauma, intrusive thoughts, avoidance, and hyperarousal.
8. studies show changes in gene expression after 8 hours of meditating in the lab
9. According to set point theory, our attitude and behaviors have a bigger effect on our happiness than our external circumstances – and that’s good news for mindfulness. Mindfulness shapes our brain by increasing gray matter in areas related to attention, learning, self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and compassion.
10. Mindfulness literally changes our brains, making some areas more responsive, interconnected, and dense. In particular, these are areas related to empathy (the insula); memory, emotion, and emotion regulation; and reward circuitry. In response to distressing stimuli, meditators see more activation in their prefrontal structures (for awareness) and less in their fear-driven amygdala.
11. They have helped people reduce chronic pain, improve psoriasis, and increase their immune response to the flu shot. One study of mindfulness/compassion meditation out of Emory University showed reductions in stress markers, and even a simple long exhale (ahhhh) increases vagal tone. And – last but not least – a three-month meditation training program boosted telomerase activity, indicating longer telemores and perhaps a longer life expectancy.
12. Kabat-Zinn says that meditation is not the goal; the point of cultivating mindfulness is to learn to live our lives like they really matter now, rather than constantly living in regret or anticipation.
13. When our mind wanders during meditation, a group of brain areas called the “default mode network” activates. Scientists aren’t exactly sure what this network does – it may be directly involved in mind wandering or simply be carrying out brain maintenance when we aren’t thinking about anything in particular. As soon as we realize our mind is wandering during meditation, other brain regions for detecting relevant events light up. As we refocus our attention on the breath, the executive brain network takes over. Experienced meditators who repeat this process thousands of times start to show differences in the brain. They develop more connection between the self-focused part of the default mode network and brain regions for disengaging attention, which makes it easier to shut off that area of the brain when they realize their minds are wandering. Over time, meditation improves working memory, fluid intelligence, and standardized test scores.

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40. courses.edx.org courses.edx.org
1. It helps to share the ideas in yourgoals and plans with other people.
2. Can you for instance advocate for awe-eliciting green spaces inthe physical spaces you inhabit to infuse communities with a greater sense of commonhumanity and increase collective happiness?

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1. Lyubomirsky makes the simple but important point that increasing your level of happiness takes sustained effort and commitment over time, just like achieving any other important goal in life.

Now the good news is, a lot of the activities that I think foster happiness, well-being, can become habitual over time, and so, once they become habitual, the effort decreases.

2. Humans tend to adapt to positive changes as well as negative ones, so it makes sense that trying a variety of happiness strategies can ensure that we don’t get numb to their benefits over time.

“Variety is not only the spice of life,” write Sheldon and Lyubomirsky in a recent book chapter, “but the spice of happiness as well.”

3. Research has also shown that the amount of effort someone puts into increasing their happiness has a large effect on whether or not an activity works. In several studies, researchers found that people who reported that they put a lot of effort into their activities saw the greatest gains in well-being. Other methods are also used to evaluate effort, such as how many characters someone writes in his or her gratitude letters.

At first glance this seems to contradict a prior finding that doing certain activities too often, like a gratitude journal, can actually erode the positive effects. However, I suppose their is a distinction between frequency of an activity and the quality of the activity.

In fact, this is discussed below:

• Duration. Happiness-increasing activities are also most effective for people who engage in them for longer periods of time, research shows. The trick, says Layous, is to make a habit of one or more positive activities without wearing yourself out.

• Dosage. Research has found that frequency and timing impact how well certain happiness-increasing activities work. More isn’t always better: The proper dosage often depends on the activity.

[examples ...] The findings may seem contradictory, but they underscore the importance of choosing activities that feel voluntary and not burdensome, say Layous and Lyubomirsky.

4. a study by Stephen Schueller, published last year in the Journal of Positive Psychology, found that people assigned to a happiness activity similar to one for which they previously expressed a preference showed significantly greater increases in happiness than people assigned to an activity not based on a prior preference. This, writes Schueller, is “a model for positive psychology exercises similar to Netflix for movies or Amazon for books and other products.”
5. Extroverts, for example, would likely benefit most from positives activities that involve socializing and being surrounded by others, whereas religious people might prefer an activity with a spiritual component.
6. In one study, Layous and Lyubomirsky found that positive activities were effective for people who were mildly depressed, but not for people who reported already being happy or severely depressed.
7. Findings indicate that adults get more out of positive activities than adolescents and college-aged students. That said, the college-age sample may be misleading, says Layous, because many undergrads are required to participate in studies for course credit, not by their own volition. In other words, a disproportionate number of students in these studies may lack the all-important motivation that their older counterparts have.
8. So far, Layous and Lyubomirsky’s analysis suggests that Westerners benefit more from positive activities than other populations, including Asians. One study conducted at UC Riverside found that Anglo-Americans benefitted more from happiness-increasing activities; however, researchers did see a small trend that Asians gained more from activities directed toward benefitting others’ happiness, like writing a letter of gratitude, than activities strictly intended to benefit the self.
9. Receiving encouragement from others also seems to maximize happiness. In one study, people who read bogus testimonials from peers saying an activity worked saw greater increases in happiness than those who did not.
10. In one study, Lyubomirsky posted online two nearly identical requests for study participants. The only difference? One version told participants the study was meant to increase their happiness, while the other simply told them they’d take part in a cognitive exercise. After performing the same happiness-inducing activities, the people who signed up for the happiness study—the group Lyubomirsky saw as more “motivated” to become happier—gained more from the study than those who signed up for the other exercise.

The study. This sounds very similar to the placebo effect, so I wonder if they have checked to see what effects they would find if they picked activities previously classified as neutral.

11. posit in their theorizing about person-activity fit that perhaps people who are high in sensationseeking might choose a really varied and novel kinds of activities for boosting their ownhappiness, whereas people who are more sort of quiet or less social or less extravertedare more likely to choose these less demanding self-reflective kinds of activities.
12. For people to benefit from a positive activity,or any self-improvement behavior for that matter, they have to effortfully engage in it,be motivated to become happier, and believe that their efforts will pay off.

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1. In one version of this experiment, if we gave participants synthetic oxytocin (in the nose, that will reach the brain in an hour), they donated to 57 percent more of the featured charities and donated 56 percent more money than participants given a placebo. Those who received oxytocin also reported more emotional transportation into the world depicted in the ad. Most importantly, these people said they were less likely to engage in the dangerous behaviors shown in the ads. So, go see a movie and laugh and cry. It’s good for your brain, and just might motivate you to make positive changes in your life and in others’ lives as well.
2. Once a story has sustained our attention long enough, we may begin to emotionally resonate with story’s characters. Narratologists call this “transportation,” and you experience this when your palms sweat as James Bond trades blows with a villain on top of a speeding train.
3. Any Hollywood writer will tell you that attention is a scarce resource. Movies, TV shows, and books always include “hooks” that make you turn the page, stay on the channel through the commercial, or keep you in a theater seat. Scientists liken attention to a spotlight. We are only able to shine it on a narrow area. If that area seems less interesting than some other area, our attention wanders.
4. This evidence supports the view of some narrative theorists that there is a universal story structure. These scholars claim every engaging story has this structure, called the dramatic arc. It starts with something new and surprising, and increases tension with difficulties that the characters must overcome, often because of some failure or crisis in their past, and then leads to a climax where the characters must look deep inside themselves to overcome the looming crisis, and once this transformation occurs, the story resolves itself.
5. When people watch Ben’s story in the lab—and they both maintain attention to the story and release oxytocin—nearly all of these individuals donate a portion of their earnings from the experiment. They do this even though they don’t have to. This is surprising since this payment is to compensate them for an hour of their time and two needle sticks in their arms to obtain blood from which we measure chemical changes that come from their brains.

(Ben's story is a very sad story)

6. I recall that Martin Seligman also mentions this buffering effect in a slightly more rich context, but the essential message is the same.

7. narratingdifficulties, frustration, stresses in the simple writing expressive paradigm leads toincreased happiness, reduced stress, reduced visits to health centers, reduced depression,even sort of better profiles of your immune system as you're handling disease.
8. When we adults unite play, love, and work in our lives, we set an example that our children can follow. That just might be the best way to bring play back into the lives of our children—and build a more playful culture.
9. Finally children do as we do, not as we say. That gives us incentive to bring play back into our adult lives. We can shut off the TVs and take our children with us on outdoor adventures. We should get less exercise in the gym and more on hiking trails and basketball courts. We can also make work more playful: Businesses that do this are among the most successful. Seattle’s Pike Fish Market is a case in point. Workers throw fish to one another, engage the customers in repartee, and appear to have a grand time. Some companies, such as Google, have made play an important part of their corporate culture. Study after study has shown that when workers enjoy what they do and are well-rewarded and recognized for their contributions, they like and respect their employers and produce higher quality work. For example, when the Rohm and Hass Chemical company in Kentucky reorganized its workplace into self- regulating and self-rewarding teams, one study found that worker grievances and turnover declined, while plant safety and productivity improved.
10. As adults have increasingly thwarted self-initiated play and games, we have lost important markers of the stages in a child’s development. In the absence of such markers, it is difficult to determine what is appropriate and not appropriate for children. We run the risk of pushing them into certain activities before they are ready, or stunting the development of important intellectual, social, or emotional skills.  For example, it is only after the age of six or seven that children will spontaneously participate in games with rules, because it is only at that age that they are fully able to understand and follow rules.
11. The results showed no advantage in reading and math achievement for children attending the academic preschools. But there was evidence that those children had higher levels of test anxiety, were less creative, and had more negative attitudes toward school than did the children attending the play preschools.
12. elementary school children become increasingly inattentive in class when recess is delayed. Similarly, studies conducted in French and Canadian elementary schools over a period of four years found that regular physical activity had positive effects on academic performance. Spending one third of the school day in physical education, art, and music improved not only physical fitness, but attitudes toward learning and test scores. These findings echo those from one analysis of 200 studies on the effects of exercise on cognitive functioning, which also suggests that physical activity promotes learning.
13. sociodramatic play, where two or more children participate in shared make believe, demonstrate the value of this play for academic, social, and emotional learning. “Sociodramatic play activates resources that stimulate social and intellectual growth in the child, which in turn affects the child’s success in school,” concludes Smilansky in a 1990 study that compared American and Israeli children. “For example, problem solving in most school subjects requires a great deal of make believe, visualizing how the Eskimos live, reading stories, imagining a story and writing it down, solving arithmetic problems, and determining what will come next.”
14. found that children who received an enriched, play-oriented parenting and early childhood program had significantly higher IQ’s at age five than did a comparable group of children who were not in the program (105 vs. 85 points).
15. In infancy and early childhood, play is the activity through which children learn to recognize colors and shapes, tastes and sounds—the very building blocks of reality. Play also provides pathways to love and social connection. Elementary school children use play to learn mutual respect, friendship, cooperation, and competition. For adolescents, play is a means of exploring possible identities, as well as a way to blow off steam and stay fit. Even adults have the potential to unite play, love, and work, attaining the dynamic, joyful state that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.”
16. it’s not hard to understand how, in any highly social species, natural selection might favor those who laugh. Laughter may help some animals avert an attack, and according to Panksepp, animals may be attracted to others who laugh, seeing their laughter as a sign that they have a positive temperament and can get along well with others—and some of those positive interactions could lead to reproduction. “Laughter indicates emotional health, just as a peacock’s tail indicates physical health,” he says. Indeed, just as humans like to spend time with their funny friends, Panksepp has found that rats gravitate towards those who “chirp” the most.
17. when rats are sizing each other up in the moments before a potential fight, which may mean that laughter can help diffuse situations that might otherwise escalate into physical conflict. Similar behavior has been documented among chimpanzees.
18. As rats age, their chirping generally becomes less frequent. (A similar phenomenon seems to occur in humans: Research done by William Fry, a professor emeritus at Stanford University School of Medicine, has found that kindergarteners laugh 300 times a day, whereas adults laugh just 17 times.) However, rats who were tickled often when young usually retain their tendency to chirp later in life.
19. It is precisely this more childlike, instinctive form of laughter that scientists believe they have uncovered in rats. Panksepp, the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science at Washington State University, has found that rats emit their high-pitched chirps when tickled, especially in areas, such as the nape of the neck, that are targeted by fellow rats during playful bouts. They make the same sounds when playing or anticipating playtime with one another, as well as when anticipating a reward. Other research has found that this chirping is common when rats enter new environments or encounter new animals; Panksepp likens this to nervous laughter in humans.
20. scientists have probed the brain circuits involved in human laughter, but this research has faced a number of limitations. For one, though researchers have used sophisticated equipment to observe people’s brain activity while they read cartoons or jokes, this equipment is quite sensitive to movement—a major drawback when you’re trying to induce a hearty belly laugh.

Why rats, which do have a form of ultrasonic laughter, have been used in laughter research.

21. In one study at San Diego State University, students enrolled in an Introductory Psychology course were taught using three kinds of lectures: one that incorporated course content-related humor; one that included humor, but not related to the course material; and one that used no humor at all. When researchers tested student’s retention of knowledge six weeks later, they found that those who attended lectures with course-related humor scored significantly higher than the other students.
22. Importantly, humor is also great for our social relationships. People list having a sense of humor as one of the most important traits in a mate. In classrooms, a humorous teacher makes learning more enjoyable and increases a student’s motivation to learn.
23. Experiments on humans have found that laughter can increase blood flow and strengthen the heart, much like aerobic exercise does. Laughter also helps decrease one’s threshold for pain, although not all humor is the same in this respect. According to Weems, positive humor—humor that looks for the bright side of troubling situations—is beneficial to our health, while darker, sardonic humor is not.
24. Take for example an old Groucho Marx joke: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.” Our brains will read the first sentence and be taken down a path imagining Grouch Marx on a safari in his pajamas, before we get the new image of the elephant actually inside his pajamas. That process of moving from one possible solution to the next involves a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate, or AC, which becomes more active when there are conflicting interpretations in the brain. The AC helps to quiet down the “louder” parts of the brain (associated with the expected response) to allow other quieter answers to emerge, and it’s particularly active during jokes. It helps us to figure out the novel solution, which, when resolved, gets incorporated into the brain and gives us that spike of dopamine. This is why we feel so good when we get a joke, and why jokes are not funny the second time around.
25. he grouped humor preferences into three types: “incongruity-resolution,” which involves “violating one’s expectations in novel ways;” “nonsense humor,” “which is funny only because it makes no sense;” and “sexual humor,” which is offensive or taboo. Although not everyone finds the same type of humor funny, the common thread in these joke types is that they all involve dealing with surprise and resolving the ensuing cognitive dissonance. “What elicits laughter isn’t the content of the joke but the way our brain works through the conflict the joke elicits,” writes Weems. Basic Books, 2014, 230 pages

Apparently fMRI was used in this work, though it isn't immediately clear how.

26. Weems explains what humor is, how things become funny, and why evolution gave us laughter. According to Weems, laughter and humor help us process conflict in our environment through the dopamine that is released in our brains when we find something funny. Dopamine relieves tension—which I discovered with my son—but it’s also implicated in motivation, memory, and attention, affecting processes as varied as learning and pain management.
27. why do we find some things funny—like Captain Kirk cringing over Cyrus’ performance—while others leave us flat? For answers, look no further than the new book, Ha!: The Science of When We Laugh and Why, by cognitive neuroscientist Scott Weems.
28. philosopher Thomas Nagelhas written about is that one of the most important achievements of the human mind isto make sure you always remember in the vast flow of human experience and time and whereyour life is going, that things can be insignificant. That everything in some sense has a smallplace in the broader flow of human experience and laughter really helps you get there, ithelps you put things into perspective sort of a almost delightful sense of the absurd.
29. the very simple finding is that the peoplewho laughed when talking about the relationship with their partners two and four years laterwere actually doing a lot better psychologically. Less anxiety, greater purpose in life, greaterrelationships with other people, less depression by finding perspective through laughter.

he studied middle-aged individuals who on average were about 45 years of age. He brought them to the lab six months after their partner had died in their lives.

30. laughing, probably through its effects on breathingwhich makes you breathe more deeply, actually calms your cardiovascular system. So, it reallyseems to be altering your stress profile as a pathway to physical health.
31. Hirosaki, for example, has found in a review that bursts of laughterdecrease blood pressure, they enhance your immune function. In certain contexts, for example,when combined with exercise, they will reduce levels of chronic pain. They will improvethe physical health of elderly populations. Other studies by Ko, for example, find laughterimproves depressive symptomatology, how well elderly patients are sleeping.
32. laughter is not only about jokes, butis just part of human speech. In fact, most forms of laugh occur in conversations whenwe’re not necessarily telling jokes but we’re trying to signal playfulness and cooperativenessto other individuals.
33. what peoplethink of as laughter is really kind of this behavioral response to contradictorypieces of information where what you assume to be true proves not quite to be true whenyou look at other information in the world.

And that motivates us to learn and to develop and to be curious as the foundation of laughter.

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1. Here are some more specific ideas for where to take an awe-inspiring walk. Natural settings: Hike up a mountain with panoramic views Walk along a trail lined with tall trees Walk along the shore of an ocean, lake, river, or waterfall Walk outside on a clear night and look up at the stars Walk to a place where you can watch a sunset or sunrise Urban settings: Climb to the top of a skyscraper or look up in an area dense with tall buildings Visit a historic monument Explore a part of the city that you've never seen before Tour of a large ballpark or stadium Go on a city art walk and explore different galleries Visit the botanical gardens or a zoo to see plants and animal species you've never seen before Walk around with no destination in mind and see where it takes you Indoor settings: Walk slowly around a museum, giving your full attention to each piece Visit a planetarium or aquarium Take a tour of a historic mansion, cathedral, or opera house

Turn off your cell phone or leave it behind

Go somewhere new when possible

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1. But does awe continue to have its beneficial effects on social behavior even if the stimulus is threatening or isn’t associated with nature at all? Indeed, after exposure to videos of threatening natural disasters (e.g. volcanoes) or beautiful close-up slow motion footage of colored drops of water, participants also showed a greater tendency toward fairness when distributing resources between themselves and another individual.
2. Participants consistently reported that awe produced “a reduced sense of self importance relative to something larger and more powerful that they felt connected to,” says Piff. And subsequent analysis confirmed that this feeling of the “small self” was responsible for their ethical behavior. This seems to suggest that experiencing awe prompts people to help others.
3. In answer to why awe would be a potent predictor of reduced pro-inflammatory cytokines, this latest study posits that “awe is associated with curiosity and a desire to explore, suggesting antithetical behavioral responses to those found during inflammation, where individuals typically withdraw from others in their environment,” Stellar said.
4. In addition to autoimmune diseases, elevated cytokines have been tied to depression. One recent study found that depressed patients had higher levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokine known as TNF-alpha than their non-depressed counterparts. It is believed that by signaling the brain to produce inflammatory molecules, cytokines can block key hormones and neurotransmitters—such as serotonin and dopamine—that control moods, appetite, sleep and memory.
5. She suggests that people evoke more feelings of awe in their lives by exposing themselves to nature, art, and music. “Put yourself in situations where you’re experiencing new things,” she says.

She = Melanie Rudd

6. researchers induced awe in some people—by having them read a story about ascending the Eiffel Tower and getting a high-up view of Paris—but not others. Afterwards, they found that members of the awe group reported feeling more satisfied with their lives than the other group. Also, when given a choice between material goods and positive experiences—such as a watch vs. tickets to a Broadway show—the awe group was more likely than the other group to choose the positive experiences.

the researchers conclude that the awe group’s higher life satisfaction and preference for experiences over objects could be explained by the fact that they felt like they had more time on their hands.

7. people who felt awe were less likely to feel impatient and more likely to volunteer their time than study participants who felt happiness. However, awe did not make people more likely to donate money, suggesting that awe does not make people more generous in general. Instead, it was the sense that they had more time to spend that seems to have made participants more willing to lend a hand.
8. There are new psychophysiological findings finding that cytokine levels, cytokinesreally reflect an inflammation in response in your body, which is very tough news onyour health, the only positive emotion that really lowers levels of cytokines is provingto be awe.
9. spiritually-orientedpeople are less likely to experience depression. Nowthose findings beg the question of why: what is it about feeling like you have a spiritualpractice? One hypothesis is, it’s really community.

(paraphrase) it could also be awe

10. that feeling awe, or elevation or inspired, in this case by beautifulnatural trees, makes people more pro-social and kind.
11. if you live around beautiful green spaces, crime drops precipitously.

This was done among urban environments, so not just "urban" vs "rural".

12. E.O. Wilson’s writing about biophilia.And it’s really this very rich hypothesis that we have this evolved love about naturalbeauty. So if you’re out in the woods, you’re in the mountains, you’re watching patternsof light on the ocean, it triggers this feeling in us, this feeling of beautiful delight ifyou will. And E.O. Wilson makes the case that that is an evolved preference because whenwe attach to beautiful things in nature, we’re finding kind of resource-richenvironments that have food and water and shelter as a way to orient towards thelandscape.
13. Awe ofcourse is very important to Immanuel Kant who wrote an essay that differentiated in1764 the experiences of the sublime or awe from beauty which we’ll talk about.
14. Edmund Burke.And what he does, and really one of the most impressive books on awe ever written, is hesecularizes awe. He takes this emotion and he shows how it really is a part of everyday,perceptual experience. So he writes about how patterns of light and dark can triggerawe, how things that are powerful like oxen can trigger awe. He kind of maps out what sortof sensations create this experience that used to be the domain of religion.
15. the scientific literature awe is defined as "the feeling of being in the presence of something vast and greater than the self, that exceeds current knowledge structures"--meaning that you need to adjust your understanding of the world, and your place within it, in order to make sense of an awe-inspiring event, feat, or behavior.
16. Research suggests that the more sort of nuanced and detailed and richour narratives are, the more resilient we are to stress, the faster we are to recover,and what we hope end up will end up being the case, is the happier we can be.

This makes sense; you need different aspects of life to buffer against downturns in other areas.

17. awe is best describedas a feeling that we have typically when we’re in the presence of something much greaterthan ourselves. So maybe we’re in a very high, expansive vantage point looking outat something huge and overwhelming or inspiring.

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1. Emmons proposes a series of questions to help people recover from difficult experiences, which I’ve adapted for the workplace: What lessons did the experience teach us? Can we find ways to be thankful for what happened to us now, even though we were not at the time it happened? What ability did the experience draw out of us that surprised us? Are there ways we have become a better workplace because of it? Has the experience removed an obstacle that previously prevented us from feeling grateful?
2. Research points to the notion that gratitude might have positive effects on transforming conflicts, which can benefit the organization and working relationships. How do you do that? It starts with the one charged with mediating the conflict: For example, a supervisor with two bickering employees might open a meeting by expressing sincere appreciation of both parties. Throughout the process, that person should never miss an opportunity to say “thank you.” The research says this attitude of gratitude will have a positive feedback effect, even if results aren’t obvious right away.
3. Giving creates gratitude, but giving can also be a good way to express gratitude, especially if the person in question is shy. You can say “thanks” by taking on scut work, lending a parking space, or giving a day off. These kinds of non-monetary gifts can lead to more trust in working relationships, if it’s reciprocal, sincere, and altruistically motivated.
4. How do you convey authenticity? Details are decisive. When you are specific about the benefits of a person, action, or thing, it increases your own appreciation—and it tells a person that you are paying attention, rather than just going through the motions.
5. The key is to create times and spaces that foster the voluntary, spontaneous expression of gratitude. It’s also the case that studies consistently show that there is such a thing as too much gratitude—it seems trying to be grateful everyday induces gratitude fatigue.
6. Employees need to hear “thank you” from the boss first. That’s because expressing gratitude can make some people feel unsafe, particularly in a workplace with a history of ingratitude.
7. The benefits of gratitude go beyond a sense of self-worth, self-efficacy, and trust between employees. When Greater Good Science Center Science Director Emiliana Simon-Thomas analyzed data from our interactive gratitude journal Thnx4.org, she found the greater the number of gratitude experiences people had on a given day, the better they felt. People who kept at it for at least two weeks showed significantly increased happiness, greater satisfaction with life, and higher resilience to stress; this group even reported fewer headaches and illnesses.
8. Gratitude is a non-monetary way to support those non-monetary motivations. “Thank you” doesn’t cost a dime, and it has measurably beneficial effects. In a series of four experiments, psychologists Adam Grant and Francesca Gino found that “thank you” from a supervisor gave people a strong sense of both self-worth and self-efficacy. The Grant and Gino study also reveals that the expression of gratitude has a spillover effect: Individuals become more trusting with each other, and more likely to help each other out.
9. Americans actively suppress gratitude on the job, even to the point of robbing themselves of happiness. Why? It may be because in theory, no one gives away anything at work; every exchange is fundamentally economic. You don’t deliver that memo to your boss at three o’clock sharp out of the goodness of your heart, but because that is what you’re being paid to do. Your “thanks” is a paycheck. Fail to do what you’re “asked,” and you may not see another one. Tellingly, only those who earned \$150,000 or more were likely to express any gratitude for their jobs, according to the Templeton survey. This hints at one of the factors that undermines gratitude at work: power and pay imbalances. In a study published in January 2012, M. Ena Inesi and colleagues found that people with power tended to believe others thanked them mainly to kiss their butts, not out of authentic feeling—and as a result of this cynicism, supervisors are themselves less likely to express gratitude.
10. Why should anyone thank you for just doing your job? And why should you ever thank your coworkers for doing what they’re paid to do? These are common questions in American workplaces, often posed rhetorically—and sometimes with hostility.
11. Trying to surprise your partner with something she didn’t even know she wanted might feel more special to you, but to maximize gratitude, it is best to give gifts that reflects your partner’s wishes.
12. Expectations are the bane of gratitude. When people expect an act of kindness, they are less grateful for it. To maximize gratitude, try doing something unexpected.
13. gratitude motivates us and it helps us to make gestures that bind us more closelywith our romantic partner, and actually with other social partners in our lives.
14. gratitude does more than just make kids feel good; it also improves their mood, mental health, and life satisfaction, and it can jumpstart more purposeful engagement in life at a critical moment in their development, when their identity is taking shape.
15. Experiences that heighten meaningful connections with others—like noticing how another person has helped you, acknowledging the effort it took, and savoring how you benefitted from it—engage biological systems for trust and affection, alongside circuits for pleasure and reward. This provides a synergistic and enduring boost to the positive experience. Saying ‘thank you’ to a person, your brain registers that something good has happened and that you are more richly enmeshed in a meaningful social community.
16. Loyola University psychologist Fred Bryant finds that savoring positive experiences makes them stickier in your brain, and increases their benefits to your psyche—and the key, he argues, is expressing gratitude for the experience. That’s one of the ways appreciation and gratitude go hand in hand.

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46. courses.edx.org courses.edx.org
1. Don’t overdo it. Evidence suggests writing occasionally (1-3 times per week) is more beneficial than daily journaling. That might be because we adapt to positive events and can soon become numb to them—that’s why it helps to savor surprises.

It could be overdoing it, or it could be due to the lack of a concentrated effect, which I believe was also speculated to be a possible reason that doing ~5 kind things all in one day was more beneficial than trying to do it throughout the week.

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47. felix-lang.org felix-lang.org
1. In my opinion one of the key properties of a scripting language is not to be found in the language itself, but rather the tools that are used to deploy it. Traditionally a script in Perl or Python can just be run, without explicitly invoking a complex compilation and linkage script.

A good point, but unlike the author, I still feel that having a REPL is also important for distinction as a scripting language, as it facilitates rapid prototyping.

2. almost all languages are dynamic and involve dynamic typing, even languages like Ocaml and Haskell. Every time your code interprets data and makes choices based on that, you have dynamic typing. The simple fact is that there's no hard and fast distinction between type information and data: constraints on data, such as the format of a stream of text, are type constraints which are beyond the static type system to check, so the checks are done dynamically at run time by your code, and that's dynamic typing!

An interesting perspective, which is a bit like the dual of the Lisp mantra: "code is data".

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48. greatergood.berkeley.edu greatergood.berkeley.edu
1. Like a lot of TV viewers these days, we binge-watch our favorite shows on Netflix, consuming two, three, or more episodes—sometimes entire seasons—at a time. But little do we realize, bingers like us are cheating ourselves out of happiness. Stephen Morris That’s the lesson from new research in the field of positive psychology. What this research shows is that indulging in life’s pleasures in smaller doses, or even giving them up for stretches of time, helps us enjoy them significantly more.

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49. courses.edx.org courses.edx.org
1. The results showed that the gratitude group reported feeling more closure and less unpleasant emotions than participants who didn’t write about their experience from a grateful perspective. The grateful writers weren’t told to deny or ignore the negative aspects of their memory. Yet they seemed more resilient in the face of those troubles.

Could be a good source for gratitude journal entries.

More tips here

2. Grateful people give credit to others, but not at the expense of acknowledging their own responsibility for their success. They take credit, too. It’s not either/or—either I did this all myself or somebody else did it for me. Instead, they recognize their own feats and abilities while also feeling gratitude toward the people—parents, teachers—who helped them along the way.
3. If I am grateful for something you provided to me, I have to take care of that thing—I might even have to reciprocate at some appropriate time in the future. That type of indebtedness or obligation can be perceived very negatively—it can cause people real discomfort. The data bear this out: When people are grateful, they aren’t necessarily free of negative emotions—we don’t find that they necessarily have less anxiety or less tension or less unhappiness. Practicing gratitude magnifies positive feelings more than it reduces negative feelings. If it was just positive thinking, or just a form of denial, you’d experience no negative thoughts or feelings when you’re keeping a gratitude journal, for instance. But, in fact, people do.
4. 1. Gratitude leads to complacency I’ve often heard the claim that if you’re grateful, you’re not going to be motivated to challenge the status quo or improve your lot in life. You’ll just be satisfied, complacent, lazy and lethargic, perhaps passively resigned to an injustice or bad situation. You’ll give up trying to change something. In fact, studies suggest that the opposite is true: Gratitude not only doesn’t lead to complacency, it drives a sense of purpose and a desire to do more.

Gratitude myth, debunked:

...Yet they don’t report feeling more satisfied with their progress toward their goals than other people do. They don’t become complacent or satisfied to the point that they stop making an effort.

5. research by my colleagues, has linked gratitude to a host of psychological, physical, and social benefits: stronger immune systems, lower blood pressure, more feelings of joy, and a greater sense of social connection, among many others.
6. The humble person says, “How can I not be filled with overflowing gratitude for all the good in my life that I’ve done nothing to merit?” The realization that all is gift is freeing, and freedom is the very foundation upon which gratitude is based. True gifts are freely given, and require no response.