Meditation is an overloaded term, and one of the overloads is (IMO) from people who are practicing a symptom of a more aware mind without knowing the goal.
Others above and below have pointed out a few great points about “meditation” that I find relevant:
- It serves to introduce a delay between stimulus and action
- It gives you the time to discover subconscious thoughts that you haven’t noticed prior that may be causing negative emotions like anxiety
I personally meditate by taking the time to think extensively about things people say to me and things I feel when I’m not in some urgent situation. Also, my extremely supportive and mindful wife and therapist are highly involved in this and I’d never have found success without them. I have a history of anger and anxiety issues. The mindfulness I describe has been my ticket out of the personal impulsive hell I built into my early 30s. Others discovered their ticket via meditation of the breathing, etc.
For me, meditation is sitting at my desk, sometimes idly and sometimes not, contemplating everything I feel, why I feel it, if it’s valid, what others feel, what my goals are (most important part), what my next steps toward those goals are (other most important part), etc.
Hope this is insightful. I think meditation is a very weakly defined term in the US.
I wonder how big it would have to be to even consider putting people on it, albeit sleeping ones. A younger me would look up the required velocity and do the math. A slightly older me is going to sleep soon and will dream that one day he gets to get into the space flinger.
Really big. Escape velocity is 11km/s. Acceleration in a circle is velocity squared divided by radius. Assuming you can withstand 10g with proper gear and drugs that's a radius of a thousand kilometers.
What about putting up something heavier, like a counterweight and a cable? Suppose the radius of the spool is a lot bigger than the launcher, and there's some kind of clutch / synchro to bring it to speed when it engages...
This is a hard part (which sounds impossible to me): since all acceleration needs to be done in a spinner, you need to get to 7900 m/s (even assuming no braking from the atmosphere).
And a = v^2 / r will turn living things into a paste for sane r. :(. I would love to be refuted.
"Braking" will commence immediately after exiting the spinner apparatus though. And commence rather unceremoniously. I don't think this is going to carry humans in the foreseeable future.
Arthur C Clarke proposed the idea in 1950 in a paper, and wrote a rather excellent short story about the concept (and a wild escape from a launch failure) called "Maelstrom II".
In Clarke's story, the launch system is located on the Moon rather than Earth; the lower escape velocity and lack of atmosphere makes the fictional engineering a lot simpler (and allows the climax of the story, which I won't spoil).
When I was younger those devices were called “mass drivers”.
The idea was crude materials would be cut up from moons and asteroids, and launched using maglev rails towards civilization centrals. Or it can also be used for recovery, so long that the landing spacecraft can successfully mate the train.
Above is portrayed first, in cases with Sci-Fi novels, then of course something terrible would occur, and the story starts to ramp up. A shivering refugee is found inside, one of containers suspiciously veer off course, the crucial docking latch breaks, etc.
Does there exist a Chrome (or otherwise) plugin that could keep track of its own like/dislike counts and display them on any given page? You could even have your own separate comment threads. Key everything out on video URL. Wouldn’t work on walled gardens, but would 100% on desktop.
It’s because they aren’t objectively bad outcomes. For the content creators it may be bad. But if the content creator is creating, say, authoritarian propaganda, the outcome for the audience is good when the dislike count goes through the roof and helps spread the message that whatever has been published is being rejected by the audience.
I am fascinated with bootloaders and kernel writing. I am not very good at it, but I am fascinated by it, and every so often I try to learn some more. It feels a bit like a useless skill to learn (legacy BIOS bootloaders, that is) given UEFI dominance. But it connects me with my childhood playing with 286es and wondering how to program them.
I love articles like this that break it down. The biggest challenges so far have been getting the assembler to output the correct format (ie, 16 bit real mode) and learning inline assembler in C (and getting GCC to output the correct format).
I definitely don't think it is a waste of time. I found it really fascinating to find out how a PC boots up from zero and how a very basic kernel is coded.
Others above and below have pointed out a few great points about “meditation” that I find relevant:
- It serves to introduce a delay between stimulus and action
- It gives you the time to discover subconscious thoughts that you haven’t noticed prior that may be causing negative emotions like anxiety
I personally meditate by taking the time to think extensively about things people say to me and things I feel when I’m not in some urgent situation. Also, my extremely supportive and mindful wife and therapist are highly involved in this and I’d never have found success without them. I have a history of anger and anxiety issues. The mindfulness I describe has been my ticket out of the personal impulsive hell I built into my early 30s. Others discovered their ticket via meditation of the breathing, etc.
For me, meditation is sitting at my desk, sometimes idly and sometimes not, contemplating everything I feel, why I feel it, if it’s valid, what others feel, what my goals are (most important part), what my next steps toward those goals are (other most important part), etc.
Hope this is insightful. I think meditation is a very weakly defined term in the US.