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punishing sieve of reality
Sunday, March 4 2018
I had a mild-to-mid-grade hangover this morning, which affected everything about the day, sapping my ambition and even forcing me to take a mid-afternoon bath. Early this afternoon, I took a nap to catch up on some of the sleep I'd missed last night.
[REDACTED]
I've been reading a book I downloaded written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb entitled Antifragile. He's the man who woke the world up to the impossibility of predicting rare events with his book The Black Swan. At first I'd been listening to an audio version of the book, but in that form it's a little hard to take because Taleb is, among other things, something of a crank, and I didn't like the tone the chosen reader was giving to his frequent snide asides (which, when I'm reading them, are less snide and more funny). I began reading the eBook version on a smartphone this afternoon in the tub, starting randomly somewhere in the middle. In this form, the book was engrossing and informative. The idea that there are a class of systems that benefit from chaos and uncertainty and atrophy without it hadn't really occurred to me, but of course that is where evolution gets the information it needs to unthinkingly assemble intelligence through the punishing sieve of reality.
This evening, I cooked up a pot of bowtie pasta and fried up some mushrooms with onions and vegan sausage, with the intention that these be added to red sauce. But the pasta sauce in the refrigerator was now covered with a whitish mold (the dogs loved it anyway) and we were forced to use Muir Glen organic Cabernet Marinara, which is, it turns out, a dreadful pasta sauce. It isn't just that it needs salt, which it does. Somehow it made Gretchen's pasta such that she couldn't finish it.
Later, while I did what I could to get a server up and running across the internet, Gretchen watched an episode of Foyle's War and then the Oscars. I have little interest in the Oscars and find it annoying when Oscars-related headlines take over my favorite news websites.
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