Notes from the Wired

This is a website where I write articles on various topics that interest me, carving out a bit of cyberspace for myself.

You shouldn't believe anything I talk about — I use words entirely recreationally.

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The Gem of Africa
March 25, 2025
A year ago, a friend of mine had the idea to visit Namibia—often referred to as the “Gems of Africa” because of its diversity of animals and biomes. I’m not entirely sure how he came up with the idea. Maybe it was due to the country’s connection to Germany during its colonial period, or perhaps some algorithmic push from the “machine gods” in his feed. Whatever the reason, he asked our friend group if we were up for joining him. Another friend said yes, but I couldn’t go because it overlapped with some exams I had to take at university. However, I promised him that next semester, I would choose modules that allowed me to have some free time, which would overlap with theirs.
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May. 14

What it is like to be a bat? Paper Title: What it is like to be a bat? Link to Paper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183914?seq=1 Date: October 1974 Paper Type: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind Short Abstract: In this paper, Nagel poses the question “What is it like to be a bat?” He concludes that it is impossible for humans to truly know, as humans and bats are too different in terms of experience and perspective. He uses this argument to challenge the “reduction to physicalism” movement, asserting that the subjective nature of consciousness cannot be fully explained by physicalist approaches.

May. 13

Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System Paper Title: Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System Link to Paper: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/time-clocks.pdf Date Published: July 1978 Paper Type: Decentralized Systems, Distributed Architectre, Process Synchronisation Short Abstract: This paper uses local “clocks” in the processes of an asynchronous distributed system to derive a total order from the happened-before relation. This approach is used to solve the problem of mutual exclusion for accessing shared resources, i.e., critical sections.

May. 11

On Seeing Beauty How, then, can you see the kind of beauty that a good soul has? Go back into yourself and look. If you do not yet see yourself as beautiful, then be like a sculptor who, making a statue that is supposed to be beautiful, removes a part here and polishes a part there so that he makes the latter smooth and the former just right until he has given the statue a beautiful face. In the same way, you should remove superfluities and straighten things that are crooked, work on the things that are dark, making them bright, and not stop ‘working on your statue’ until the divine splendour of virtue shines in you, until you see ‘Self-Control enthroned on the holy seat’. […]