cb's blog

a lil blog nobody reads that isn't updated often

Second Order Black Swans

Mar 10, 2017

I suppose it’s simply in the nature of exponentiality that black swans build upon one another. Last night, I learned a little bit about the differences between analog & digital and thought quite a lot about Taleb’s writing on the black swan of recorded music, and that because recordings came about, people were much more likely to support those who were already popular & dead & gone than those nearby. A form of specialization, I suppose, but the introduction of music that was able to be transported and played and replayed whenever the listener wanted created an ‘extremistan’ of the...

Moral Transubstantiation (or Lack Thereof)

Mar 9, 2017

This fall, I became a little obsessed with a topic that I’ve come to find discussed only in the context of the eucharist of the Catholic Church (something I attribute to the fact that the man I learned it from is a scholar of the political economics of churches). That topic is transubstantiation, however not of the physical kind: moral transubstantiation. I understood, in what I can only call an idealistically classically liberal way, that everything I’d noticed over the years prior of confusing and profit-related motivations even to those in the public sector could be attributed to the fact...

American Exceptionalism

Mar 4, 2017

I feel as though most my of strongest feelings and nuanced beliefs come from podcasts, and while I recognize the danger in forming one’s beliefs from a single source, I’d like to think that my enjoyment of podcasts isn’t any different than the enjoyment someone might receive from gathering news from a few different magazines. Anyway, today I was listening to this episode of Criminal and was deeply disturbed by the realizations it inspired about being born & the state of humanity.

Nagging Existential Angst

Mar 1, 2017

This feeling began when I was taking an IB Diploma course called the theory of knowledge. I sat in a class full of intensely motivated kids like me with too many books in my backpack, not nearly enough sleep, and a never-ending feeling that if I didn’t do something (never a something I’d already done), I was destined for a life without meaning, full of dollar store cheetos and other uncomfortably awful things. We were talking about different philosophers & their views on consciousness; what it meant to exist. “Well, it’s really all just a fucking construct then, isn’t it,”...

More Gap Years

Feb 26, 2017

A few days ago, I read Zuckerberg’s lofty manifesto and understood it as a relevant piece fighting to cast Facebook in a different post-election light than discussions of fake news and echo chambers. I found it interesting, value globalization, and appreciate the idea of removing arbitrary boundaries, but felt as though I was reading Facebook’s mission statement. Then, when perusing different podcasts after making it through all my favorites, I landed on one called Exponent. The title intrigued me; I’ve been reading Taleb’s The Black Swan & thinking quite a lot about the unpredictable nature of change....

Metaphors And Morning Runs

Feb 24, 2017

I love to run. Not fast, but far enough that I feel connected to my body in a different way. Recently, I’ve been drawing a lot of connections between the things I see on runs and issues discussed in the world around me, so I’d like to write them down.

A Love Affair With An Algorithm

Feb 14, 2017

About a year ago I got a spotify subscription. I loved poking around and clicking from artist to related artist and finding all kinds of great jams. I started subscribing to playlists too… Muted Jazz, Chill Party, Mellow Morning, among other ones with syllable names. Then, while perusing the main page, I saw a cool one called Discovery Weekly. I looked through the music on it (I was really into an Icelandic pop artist at the time) and saw some favorites and some that had album covers I would typically dig (fuzzy childhood photos, taxidermied animals) and subscribed. The playlist...

Thelonious Monk

Feb 11, 2017

I’ve been playing Monk all morning. Thinking quite a lot about how well the name fits the music. I don’t know enough about music to understand the difference between homophone-esque words like melodious, harmonious, mellifluous and euphonious, but it seems to me that Monk’s music is all of those things, and that Thelonious should be one of those terms. According to his wikipedia page, his middle name is Sphere, which might fit into this argument as well, in that the warmth of his music is without the sharpness of corners, but pops of a baritone saxophone and bursts of the...