What luxury to get mad
about last night's basketball loss
and watch the full moon descending
at the speed the earth turns.

Things could get worse
personally and for the community.
Bombings, killings, anomie
boiling frogs and witches cursing.

The changing climate,
typhoons in the Philippines,
volcanoes and tsunamis, WWII which I missed,
Thanksgiving nor'easter, Easter twister.

What abundance to fast or feast,
your choice, stay inside by the stove
or go outside, climb the mountainside.
Live in a city or small town.

So I raged at the coaches
for their lazy zone defense
like an alien in the bleachers
unable to affect the outcome.

When my sons came home
I yelled at them too. What opulence
to be angry about nothing of consequence
neither stopped by the cops nor slipped on the ice.

Plenty of sleep, no more tv, the wars in the Middle East
are resource wars, disguised as religious debates.
So Dad would say.

A beautiful winter day, hunting
season. A Gun In Every Home, in light of U.S. mass shootings
seems an irresponsible poem. 10K clicks

most popular poem on line, NRA enthusiasts and conservative
talk show hosts quoting it. Not really, no worries, poetry
makes nothing happen. Which is something, magic.

               *                     *                     *

I wonder if I'll have to someday defend that poem,
as in a Russian or Chinese show trial, Salem witch trial,
McCarthy anti-American committee or a college
political correctness safety hearing. Oh well.

What does it mean? Doc Wiseman says that's not how we decide
things in this country, lynching and chasing people with dogs.
You'd think twice about bombing Iran if Iran had the bomb.
Assume a defensive posture.

I've been reading Walzer's
Just and Unjust Wars, much like explaining how to tie your shoes,
or teaching an artificial intelligence to walk, talk
and think about God.

               *                     *                     *

The citizenry doesn't need weaponry sufficient to win a war,
just enough to give pause during its normal pursuit of pleasure
(hunting deer on a beautiful, clear winter morning).

Hunting and gathering and agriculture, local and small
or these almonds I'm eating from California's Imperial
Valley and all the water it took to grow 'em.

Slowly
          drip irrigation
                               takes hold.

Technologies
such as the Anasazi and other aborigines used are uploaded
for sustainable survival.

Much good goes with the bad,
school shootings with school science shows, art shows and
      Shakespeare's plays.
How to stop the unhappiness of ISIS

those lonesome souls from interfering with the evolution
of the species? With love. What did Christ mean
(and what did Wallace Stevens mean by imagination)?

               *                     *                     *

Accept (but contain).
Trust (but verify). Ha ha! Reagan was a pretty funny guy.
It must bother a president, a regular fellow who'll pack his suitcase and
      go back
to Iowa when his term is up, to know he's ordered the death
of a janitor on the night shift at a nuclear reprocessing plant
in a proportional response to a mullah's anger. Jurors

in the trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
have sentenced him to death. For his role in killing four people
and wounding hundreds more. There was no visible reaction
from Tsarnaev, 21, in the quiet courtroom.
Justice. In his own words "an eye for an eye."
Survivor Jared Clowery said he was happy not to have had to make the
      choice between life and death himself but he stands behind the jury's
      decision.

"There's nothing happy about having to take someone's life."
Good people without guilt or gloating. Yet
my thought was now we must forego the possibility of knowing
this young man's mind. There's still time to ask him questions
as in Dead Man Walking. To understand is to love
requiring the patience of the scientific method.

               *                     *                     *

Yesterday's single greatest joy
was solving the equation
T = 2π(r3/GMe)½
for Haley's comet orbiting
the sun.

And sitting in the sun
on a winter day.

Moby ****, geometry, physics.
Study every subject everyday.
Homework is an indicator of future success.
Success is not necessarily happiness but it helps.
Freedom is to formulate your own definition of success.
Happiness is an imaginary tree, its own reward, and a fact.
Facts and fiction may be memorialized in memos or found in dreams.
The story starts thus: Each summer the honeysuckles and the
      huckleberries . . .
The web is that extra brain we've all been dreaming of having.
Like jumping 4 meters or flying without a plane.
To fly like that must one first have homework?
Some say yes, some say don't. It depends on how you vote.
Happiness is what happens when everything that happens
Fits the time perfectly and it's all out of your hands.
Not exactly. You don't let go of the steering wheel while driving fast in
      the passing lane.
You look left and right and check your blind spots.
Homework is an introduction to everything you're not
And all you do not know. It's supposed to help you learn to know where
      you want to go before going where you have to go.
Otherwise you end up on Ulzana's raid
Bleeding, without a bandaid.
All the achievement in the world won't relieve your loneliness
Or satisfy your ****** longing. What girls are like behind their eyes.
Survival, procreation. That's all there is to love.
But the loved one is the one who can be trusted with your life.
Whether Christ or your wife. The Muslim moms.
On my walk in the woods I come to a sitting spot
Above a small gorge cut by a stream through hemlocks.
Here someone has left a statuette of the Buddha and the flags you see
Flapping in the wind at sky funerals.
This is a pretty good place to sit quietly and think about homework.

How to break an addiction. Decide to live.
What can I learn from my pain. Danger.
And friends are merely friendly, live on independent
of your injury. You will not be missed in church on Sunday.

Grass. ****, broccoli, burrito, stink, ***, skunk.
I'm talking blue grama, upland bent, smooth brome,
riverside panic, wild rye, fowl meadow, spike muhly,
sweet vernal, salt marsh, bristly foxtail, little bluestem.

****** is unhealthy, opens lesions in the brain,
wormholes into hell, yet should be legal. I'll vote that way.
It may ease the pathos into non-existence
well as meditation, bird watching, last will and testament.

Each joint hurts, rib joints, spine joints, skull plate joints.
The head and hip and heart will hurt, all three.
Insomniac I like the way bones crack and clack like
wooden wind chimes, an untuned piano, a tree rack of wornout
      shoes.

Never forget, the mind is the body paying attention
to what it's doing. Without that connection, each finger bent
or toe smashed is just added to the collection
of anonymous body parts of holocaust victims

in their mass graves. Better when every life saved
or lost is a front page story, an illusion of shared
sacrifice or joy, but that expresses only the surface
of our emotions. I'm mostly relieved to have survived.

In the singularity
perfectly good poems
are being written by laughing
and crying machines
washing machines and dryers
about their daily tasks
and ambivalences
which will be indistinguishable
from those of future
farmers and philosophers.

In the singularity
evolution can be said
to be the master sorter of data
as in the factories
of the suns
where protons are smashed together
and unusual weather patterns
make consciousness a candidate
interesting for its complete dependence
on the substrate of the brain and body.

In the singularity
everything anyone once did
always remains current
as if invented yesterday
for an immediate purpose
such as curing cancer
although that may be unnecessary
to achieving immortality
i.e. the happiness one feels
the day before thanksgiving.

If you see a hawk
on a bough at field's edge
beyond the corner you should have turned
maybe it's a sign to go on.

Such as during an improvisation on
Flamingo or I've Got You Under My Skin
you play in the wrong key or mode completely
maybe it's a sign to go on, in the wrong key.

Or when my sons cry not wanting
to be alone, I'm upstairs writing
or just enjoying trees in every direction
it too may be a sign to go on alone.

.
                              Some say the scientific method
                              Is the ultimate algorithm and others
                              Prefer prayer.

For symbolists, all intelligence can be reduced to manipulating symbols, in the same way that a mathematician solves equations by replacing expressions by other expressions. Symbolists understand that you can't learn from scratch: you need some initial knowledge to go with the data. They've figured out how to incorporate pre-existing knowledge into learning, and how to combine different pieces of knowledge on the fly in order to solve new problems. Their master algorithm is inverse deduction, which figures out what knowledge is missing in order to make a deduction go through, and then makes it as general as possible.

                              Tea
                    ­          In its simplicity
                              Can sustain concentration

For connectionists, learning is what the brain does, and so what we need to do is reverse engineer it. The brain learns by adjusting the strengths of connections between neurons, and the crucial problem is figuring out which connections are to blame for which errors and changing them accordingly. The connectionists' master algorithm is back propagation, which compares a system's outputs with the desired one and then successively changes the connections in layer after layer of neurons so as to bring the output closer to what it should be.

                              Hungry and cold
                              A holy condition
                              A warrior's position in the world
                              
Evolutionaries believe that the mother of all learning is natural selection. If it made us, it can make anything, and all we need to do is simulate it on the computer. The key problem that evolutionaries solve is learning structure: not just adjusting parameters, like back propagation does, but creating the brain that these adjustments can then fine-tune. The evolutionaries' master algorithm is genetic programming, which mates and evolves computer programs in the same way that nature mates and evolves organisms.

                              Arithmetic
            ­                  A good ****'s the metric
                              Of a dying man

Bayesians are concerned above all with uncertainty. All learned knowledge is uncertain, and learning itself is a form of uncertain inference. The problem then becomes how to deal with noisy, incomplete, and even contradictory information without falling apart. The solution is probabilistic inference, and the master algorithm is Bayes' theorem and its derivatives. Bayes' theorem tell us how to incorporate new evidence into our beliefs, and probabilistic inference algorithms do that as efficiently as possible.

                              I can't believe
                              I won't live forever, therefore,
                              I invented an afterlife to supplement reincarnation

For analogizers, the key to learning is recognizing similarities between situations and thereby inferring other similarities. If two patients have similar symptoms, perhaps they have the same disease. The key problem is judging how similar two things are. The analogizers' master algorithm is the support vector machine, which figures out which experiences to remember and how to combine them to make new predictions.

                              Prepare for a powerful anesthesia
                              Chemical processes irresistible
                              A good and perfect rest