"Hard work doesn’t guarantee success, but lack of hard work almost certainly guarantees failure."
Need to get this through my head, quickly.
It's from the SMBC guy. Apparently he went back to college for a second bachelor's, at a state school just like I've been considering. In-state would mean Mizzou, UMSL or Rolla though for me now...
Also, this is a really entertaining website, and just from looking at one of the solutions there's so much math and physics I've forgotten and so much that I've never even thought about. The former is sad/pathetic and the latter should have been obvious.
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Decided to start drawing again.
Working on getting Illustrator again. Probably should invest in another computer and do things properly though.
Friends are also taking time off. If I was thinking I probably would have done a semester or a year of my own...
Apartments are opening up, haha. Maybe I should be looking more into them, doing the rational thing -- at least double-checking my options.
LNYF.... is worrying.... hitori de yatteitara yokatta noni ><; or not been such a Nice Guy (tm) ><;;
Gotta remember to start watching TED talks
I've only recently started saying it to people, but I don't understand money. I have no concept of value (other than an aversion to paying for anything which leads to mizerly qualities that are only mitigated by instances of splurging on insignificant items during moments of weakness and/or laziness), or why other people value it. I understand even less about the stock market, and agree wholeheartedly with the idea that our economical models cannot possibly be based in sound logic if they are under the assumption of limitless growth and eventual equality in terms of payment of all people and that a post-agricultural/post-industrial global society can be a reality.
As such I've purposefully stopped myself from learning economics and business models (although they both represent major options in terms of opening up possible career paths and employment opportunities, so I may wind up studying them (MBA, anyone?) and pretending to understand and play along with the other people, kinda like a useful application of (hopefully limited-mode) non-savant autistic qualities.
Anyway, stumbling through wikipedia and a couple of other sources I came across the story of one Nassim Nicholas Taleb , who more or less shares some of those ideas with me and is a sudden big inspiration, although he does understand the markets and a whole lot better than I aspire to. He wrote a book, The Black Swan , a revamping of a theory that I originally thought was related to the recent movie (which I also cannot believe is scary...) detailing how the investment strategies embodied by and in the general stock market don't make sense in the long term, and the paranoia that is synonymous with the stock market floor really doesn't matter in terms of investment strategies. Anyway, he concentrates on the low probability of events with an extremely high effect on things, and our ignorance of them even though they happen all the time; in this story detailing a sort of battle of morals and strategy with one-time mentor Victor Niederhoffer, the part where he described how it is easy to be the one that wins small things over a long time and bounce back from large losses, but it is much harder for us to deal with steady losses while waiting in the hopes of a huge payout. Inspiration, and better put in the article and probably his book as well.
Hoping to find the stocks of ここがへんだよ、日本人!, a TBS show that ran until 2002. Occasionally there's some on youtube, but there's 4 years worth of dialogue and an interesting study to be done (Ohohoh, focus for Masters/PH.D in Gaijin Studies?) just on the transcription of their speech, as pointed out in a few forums, and the clashes in use of language (like one I only noticed my 5th or so time in watching, on an episode about the 植民地としての韓国、アフリカの奴隷歴史との比較される部分に, the korean girl referred to the fast talking Zomahoun Idossou Rufin by his number and he got angry emphasizing the point the slaves lost their names and how the realities of the slave trade far outweigh the 35, no 36 (lol, reference to the show) years of colonization a unified Korea experienced. I am not sure I completely agree with that statement, although I do admire the Japanese colonization in Taiwan and Korea in it's role of the most successful language socialization ever, and think that looking at the colonization from the lens of a 政治同化 (I think that's what they called it on the show) is an interesting approach that needs more looking into -- there's probably someone that's written about it (or the colonization era in general), and anything that has takes away from my fulbright/phd disseration ideas! Add to that that time is of the essence, in being able to access (as coldly as that sounds) the people who survived the colonization and came away with Japanese ability. Learning Chinese and eventually Korean will still give me access to many other sources, and the topic of a gaijin literature in the colonization era doesn't really apply to mainland China as far as I know and would thus just be limited to the ex-patriots who were sent to the war areas and the number of colonizers that went... but my main priority in that is definitely the reception of foreign authors.
On that note still searching for places to maintain and improve my Japanese skills. Started finally going through the kanji 2100 book again, to finally get down the ones I don't recognize and increase my initial reading fluency. I need to find more sources for literature that's fun and challenging to read (Waseda's libraryyyyy whyyyyyy oh whyyyyy did I waste youuuuuuuu), but came across a couple others in my search for koko ga hen dayo. TBS news, a japanese meme , and of course asking friends (eventually).
Still have to reply to Rari. OMG.
And, echoing an inspiration というか共感 with the smbc guy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_video_websites for learning on my own about a variety of topics. Other stuff to look up: science Friday’s discussion with Sam Harris (smbc guy). The Teaching Company survey courses (same guy) "Fooled by Randomness," (Taleb)
Finally starting to proofread the thesis.
Ah. Gotta reply to Aridome sensei soon ><;;
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