Desert Rose
The musings of an artistic scientist or a scientific artist
May 5, 2024
Aug 25, 2023
Carlo Cipolla's Laws of Stupidity
"By creating a graph of Cipolla's two factors, we obtain four groups of people.
Helpless people contribute to society but are taken advantage of by it;
Intelligent people contribute to society and leverage their contributions into personal benefits;
Stupid people are counterproductive to both their and others' interests;
Bandits pursue their own self-interest even when this poses a net detriment to societal welfare. An additional category of ineffectual people either exists in its own right or can be considered to be in the center of the graph."
Sep 5, 2022
Windows 11 bootable usb installer from MacOSX
- Use 'Disk Utility' application to format the USB drive in MS-DOS (FAT) format
- Download the windows ISO file from the Windows website or other source
- Extract the ISO and copy all but the 'sources' directory into your USB
- Create a 'sources' directory into your USB and copy everything from the ISO's 'sources' directory but 'install.wim'
- Install Homebrew in your Macbook. Homebrew is a missing package manager for macOS (or Linux)
- Go to this website https://brew.sh
- Copy the comand
- Paste it in a 'Terminal'
- Use Homebrew to install wimlib
- $brew install wimlib
- Use wimlib to split 'install.wim' into two files (install.swm and install2.swm) as follows into your installer USB:
- $wimlib-imagex split /Volumes/.../sources/install.wim /Volumes/.../sources/install.swm 4000
- Plugin the USB into your PC and select the boot option (by hitting the key F9/F11/ALT)
- Follow the click and install rest of the process to successfully install Windows 11 into your PC
Reference: Create bootable Windows 11 installation USB from macOS
Sep 3, 2022
Eros and Psyche
Eros -- mythical son of Penia (goddess of poverty) and Porus (god of wealth) -- forever in need and forever being pursued.
Aug 31, 2022
Jul 22, 2022
"The Mind-Body Problem" - Rene Descartes
Mind: What is characteristic of a mind, Descartes claims, is that it is conscious, not that it has shape or consists of physical matter. Our bodies are certainly in space, and our minds are not, in the very straightforward sense that the assignation of linear dimensions and locations to them or to their contents and activities is unintelligible.
Body: According to Descartes, matter is essentially spatial, and it has the
characteristic properties of linear dimensionality. Things in space have
a position, at least, and a height, a depth, and a length, or one or
more of these. Mental entities, on the other hand, do not have these
characteristics.
Objection to mind-body problem: The difficulty, however, is not merely that mind and body are different. It is that they are different in such a way that their interaction is impossible because it involves a contradiction. It is the nature of bodies to be in space, and the nature of minds not to be in space, Descartes claims. For the two to interact, what is not in space must act on what is in space. Action on a body takes place at a position in space, however, where the body is. Apparently Descartes did not see this problem.
- Our minds are not physically connected to our bodies! How could they be,
if they are nonphysical? That is the point whose importance Princess
Elisabeth and Gassendi saw more clearly than anyone had before them,
including Descartes himself.
Significance of the problem: That this straightforward test of physicality has survived all the
philosophical changes of opinion since Descartes, almost unscathed, is
remarkable.
Reference: Descartes and the discovery of "The Mind-Body Problem"
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To install pngwrite we need to install to helper library before we install pngwriter. 1. libpng 2. freetype2 We can use fink or macport to i...
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"By creating a graph of Cipolla's two factors, we obtain four groups of people. Helpless people contribute to society but are...
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Use 'Disk Utility' application to format the USB drive in MS-DOS (FAT) format Download the windows ISO file from the Windows websit...