On Our Purpose: As the major theme of Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead and George Hotz recently reminded me, one of the greatest foes we have as humans has always been nature. Nature, and the elements, is something we’ve always had to battle in our efforts to survive and continue our existence. That is why shelter has always been one of our major concerns - alongside food and water. This is something we should remind ourselves more frequently, especially as we fight over the usual problems such as race, nationality, and religion - to name a few!

Update On Descartes: I finished reading Descartes’ Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy a couple weeks ago, and I wanted to write down some things I took away from the text. First of all, I’m glad that I got to read some of Descarte’s work - it was really cool to see where the famous line “I think, therefore I am” came from and in the proper context. It was also really cool to see his mind at work in the meditations portion of the book, where he very plainly stated his goal of questioning everything he had always thought to be true, including his own existance, and then going through the exercise in a surprisingly simple step-by-step process.

On Neutrinos: Eric Weinstein brought up neutrinos in a talk recently, quipping that we should be glad we can’t feel neutrinos in this space “because they’re tearing through all of us body and soul.” Ironically, he was defending Brian Green and String Theory when he made this remark - pointing out that there is still a lot we don’t understand of subatomic particles. This is ironic, by the way, because Eric is known for being very critical of string theory and the scientists behind the long-running scientific effort.

On Descartes: I’m reading Descartes’ Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy and I didn’t know that it was mostly a defense of theism! I’m not sure what I was expencting, as I only really knew that he was very influential, but I was surprised that this is the focus of the text. Now, I only recently started the book but because it is so short I’m already about half-way through it and I have some thoughts on it already…

On the Future: “We Wanted Flying Cars, Instead We Got 140 Characters.” This is a famous Peter Thiel quote that I think perfectly encapsulates his views on the current state of technology and innovation in the world. The argument is a simple yet powerful one: we’ve falling behind in technological progress. Half a century ago, people thought we would have flying cars by now, instead our only innovation has essentially come in the form of 0s and 1s, mostly related to or for the benefit of internet technologies.