The flowers depart when we hate to lose them;

The weeds arrive while we hate to watch them grow.

— Dogen

Flipping Backwards

I cried over and over, again and again, for weeks on end. The only thing I looked forward to was using drugs or alcohol at night to forget, or finishing a project I was working on to distract myself between crying episodes. It wasn’t that we weren’t compatible, it was that practical facts about life happened, and I was afraid of admitting my growing admiration. The result was that I found myself having to mute my computer video in…

In The Symposium, Plato lays out his transcendent idea of love. He states that love has nothing to do with loving someone, but love is making things that makes the city-state more virtuous. Loving any one specific person is a waste of time, says Plato. It only sets you up for grief and hardship, and makes you less able to create good things, which is the real beauty in life. But Plato’s opinion that physical love lacks something undergirds most Western societies’ opinion of it.

Plato thinks solely physical love is incapable of virtue, and therefore is wrong; whereas most…

The Symposium

What is love? The ancient Greeks thought long about this question that haunts and enthralls most people. Love has a mixed track record, bringing empires into conflict, men to death, women to grief, and philosophers to answers that are at odds with what most people think. What is it, what are the bare minimum requirements for love, how can it go wrong, and how can it go right? These are the questions of the Symposium, in which the format for discussion is several speeches from notable Athenians.

The Symposium was written by Plato, and reflects what the upper-class Athenians thought…

Blue Light Blues

Removing blue light exposure before bed is casually mentioned in conversation about improving sleep. But what does the science say? A meta-analysis reviews the question and looks for consistencies between studies. What did they find? First a small mechanistic explanation of the proposed reason why blue light is bad.

Blue light filters block 450–480 nm light. Retinal ganglion cells are highly sensitive to this wavelength, showing peak activation after exposure. This in turn suppresses melatonin secretion and increases neurocognitive alertness. Electronic personal devices with such a wavelength seem to increase the time it takes to fall asleep, and reduces subjective…

Learning

Learning and addiction are highly related. If organisms cannot form causal connections between drugs and their source, they cannot form behavior to increase the benefits of the drug. Therefore, examining both learning and addiction in model organisms is in order to solve addiction. Fruit flies, drosophila, can actually tell us much about both phenotypes.

Invertebrates have a stigma surrounding them, that they are incapable of doing the things that “higher” organisms do. One of the things that belongs to “higher” organisms is learning. It is very human-centric to think that a biological adaption to the universal law of change —…

Pick Your Poison

When people use drugs to cope, we typically look down on them. But at the end of the day we have to realize competing values. When a person with ADHD takes Adderall, most people don’t take any issue with this, as it’s a medication. The clinical efficacy of Adderall seems positive. For one, Adderall increases attention span, which is highly associated with wellbeing and academic performance — I’m not concerned about Adderall specifically, just drugs that increase wellbeing and functionality in society. No one prefers to be more unclear in thought, and Adderall remedies this. Prescription drugs have little stigma…

Perspective Piece

King Solomon’s Ring

Konrad Lorenz was the modern founder of ethology. Ethology is the study of animal behavior, namely the study of animals in their natural habitat — where animals behave as they evolved to. Lorenz was an eclectic keeper of animals — passersby’s of his Austrian house have bore witness to him squatting in his yard and quacking, with a slew of ducklings in tow — trying to get them to follow. …

A Rugged Economy

The 19th-century naturalist, poet, essayist, abolitionist, and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau has taken criticism of late. However, most of his work, and especially that in his famous book Walden, stands independent of that criticism. We must hold off the charges that he is hypocritical, and examine his claims about the nature of the world and judge them independently.

Walden is a collection of stories of Thoreau’s time spent on Walden pond, a pond in Massachusetts that is not so remote from Concord. He built a cabin nearby in which he spent a couple years “living simply”. Walden asks the question…