Tag: energy

Miracle? All of it.

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HongBo-Drawing

Fashionable descriptions of the inevitable triumph of machine intelligence (over man) contain many critical biases and assumptions that could derail them from turning into reality. […]

Our brains use energy at a rate of about 20 watts. If you wanted to upload yourself intact into a machine using current computing technology, you’d need a power supply roughly the same as that generated by the Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric plant in China, the biggest in the world. To take our species, all 7.3 billion living minds, to machine form would require an energy flow of at least 140,000 petawatts. That’s about 800 times the total solar power hitting the top of Earth’s atmosphere. Clearly human transcendence might be a way off.

~ Caleb Scharf, Where Do Minds Belong

Find more at Steve Layman’s Blog: A Power Shortage. (Thank you Steve)

Notes:

  • Related Posts: Miracle? All of it.
  • Drawing: HongBo 洪波 (Chinese, Shanghai, China) – Untitled, 2011 – Drawings: Pastels. Source: Thank you Your Eyes Blaze Out
  • Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Lift it. Lift it way up.

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jellyfish-blue

My mood suddenly lifted.
The day was crisp and bright,
the atmosphere quivering with life,
like the translucent strands of a rare aquatic species
with long, flowing tentacles,
lappets flowing vertically from a jellyfish’s bell.
Would that human energy could materialize in such a way.
I imagine such strands waving horizontally
from the edges of my black coat.

~ Patti Smith, M Train

Notes:

Lightly child, lightly.

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Woman-light-fatigue

Then you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, like flute notes rising up, like the words of glass speaking. Then there comes a point when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light.

— Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water 

Notes:

  • Photo: Self portrait by Melania Brescia – “Fade and then Return” (via Mennyfox55)
  • Quote: Fables of Reconstruction
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

It’s been a long day

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fumerolle_Johanne-cullen-woman-tired

I see and inhabit beauty in a blink.
But it doesn’t change me within.
It doesn’t release the iron jaws of worry,
the buzzing hurry,
the dull certainty that I am, we are,
the world is spiraling down.
Where are you in this?
How can I access the energy
that used to hold me aloft?

~ Dani Kopoulos

Notes:

And the answer is?

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portrait-man-stress
Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath in Why You Hate Work:

The way we’re working isn’t working. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a job, you’re probably not very excited to get to the office in the morning, you don’t feel much appreciated while you’re there, you find it difficult to get your most important work accomplished, amid all the distractions, and you don’t believe that what you’re doing makes much of a difference anyway. By the time you get home, you’re pretty much running on empty, and yet still answering emails until you fall asleep…

…Demand for our time is increasingly exceeding our capacity — draining us of the energy we need to bring our skill and talent fully to life. Increased competitiveness and a leaner, post-recession work force add to the pressures. The rise of digital technology is perhaps the biggest influence, exposing us to an unprecedented flood of information and requests that we feel compelled to read and respond to at all hours of the day and night…

Find the rest of the story (and the solution to the problem) here: Why You Hate Work

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