Thu Aug 25 09:14:18 EDT 2016

Slept from ten-something until after eight without waking. My phone battery died in the night, so I woke fully rested and hustled to get to work.

High of eighty-five. Thunderstorms, likely before six this evening.

Goals:

	Work:
	- Check if Danny has approved Office PO
	  Done.
	  Danny still hasn't approved it.
	- Review invoices
	  Done.
	- Continue work on DNS
	  Done.
	  Added notes, and actually installed and played with Unbound a little.

Half hour walk at lunch. Humid. Saw a dragonfly, a seagull, a turkey vulture, and one of those black flying crickets.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12360447

	Home:
	- Finish playing with markdown slides
	  Done.
	  https://paulgorman.org/technical/presentation_slides_markdown_pandoc.txt
	- Dinner at dad's
	  Done.

Hidden game in Chrome (and Chromium):
chrome://network-error/-106

http://fivebooks.com/interview/massimo-pigliucci-stoicism/
	The early Stoics thought that there were three areas of philosophical inquiry. What they called ‘physics’ is what today we would describe as a combination of metaphysics and natural science. Their ‘logic’ we would still call logic today, but for them it included epistemology, cognitive science, and psychology. And then there was the ‘ethics’, which was the study of how to live your life. Their idea was that in order to figure out how to live your life, you needed to understand how the universe works and what your place in it was—that would be the ‘physics’—and you also needed to understand how human beings reason and fail to reason well; that’s where the ‘logic’ came in.
	Now, Epictetus didn’t necessarily reject this, he just said there were many different alternatives, many different ways of doing or understanding physics and understanding logic that would support the same way of living your life. So, in modern terms, we would say that Epictetus thought that the physics and the logic were relevant at some level to the ethics, but they underdetermine it. It’s not as if you need to know all the details about how the world works in order to figure out how to live your life.
	For the early Stoics, the emphasis was on what the Greeks called the eudaimonic life. The eudaimonic life, which is often translated as ‘the happy life’, doesn’t really translate very well—it’s more like ‘the flourishing life’. For the Stoics in particular the eudaimonic life was a moral life. It was the kind of life where you are on your deathbed, you look back and you say: ‘Yes, that was worth it: there is not much that I’m ashamed of, that was a life well-lived, not just in the sense that I thrived in terms of material possessions, but mostly I was a good person.’
	The later Stoics, such as Epictetus, based in Rome, added a second component to this. They retained this fundamental idea that it’s about practising virtue, it’s about having the good moral life, but they also added what they call apatheia, which of course is the Greek root for the English word ‘apathy’, and yet has nothing to do with it. They didn’t counsel apathy. What they did counsel was apatheia. The best way to translate this word is as ‘magnanimity’ or ‘great soul-ness’. So the idea was that you achieved tranquillity in life, you achieved what the Epicureans, who were rivals of the Stoics, called ataraxia or tranquility of mind, if you developed a magnanimous attitude towards the world.

I quite like the public domain Matheson translation of Epictetus (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Enchiridion), but I'm giving the Robert Dobbin Penguin edition a try.

Stopped at the grocery on my way home.

Breakfast: yogurt, spinach
Lunch: coffee with half-and-half, nuts
Dinner: beef, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes