News

Uchiyama Roshi, in his commentary in the book Master Dogen’s Zazen Meditation Handbook.

In mathematics, one plus one equals two. None of us doubt this. But actually, this is only correct from the standpoint of mathematics. In life experience, when my car crashes into another car, the hoods are dented, tires come off, and glass breaks into pieces. No cars remain. With cars, one plus one makes zero, or we could say that one plus one makes infinity, because the two cars break apart into an infinite number of pieces.

The following example is even clearer. One man plus one woman makes three or four when they have children.

Once I took a piss in the ocean. At that moment I clearly understood that one plus one makes only one. The one was the ocean. Nothing was changed even after my piss was added. The ocean was not concerned about my piss at all.

:-)

Consider the fascinating case of Vicente Lusitano, a Portugese musician of African origins, whose extraordinary life story deserves a movie. He not only traveled from the Iberian Peninsula to Rome, where he served as a priest, but later moved to Germany where he resided as the husband of a Protestant.

You can’t get much more cross-cultural than that in the year 1550.

How African Musicians Came to Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Doc left a good question in the comments:

I’m looking to update my home listening. I’m starting from scratch, again, building a system, what would you pick? I know that’s a loaded question, because of the plethora of available pieces, but a “simple” solution to a complex issue. I’ve been lamenting the piecemeal listening for a while, and finding a vintage vinyl copy of, The Wall, made me think is should return to a home dedicated system.

Let’s help Doc out. What does your system look like and what would you recommend? 

The first question has to be, what’s the budget. Speakers can go from reasonable to stratospheric in a flash. I hear good things about the Sonos systems, but have no personal experience with their gear. 

My second thought is that a dedicated player, such as the ones Astell & Kern make, could multitask as a system on the go and, plugged into the sound system, as both the file player and DAC (digital-to-analog converter). I don’t have one of those but Jon has carried one for years and also plugs it into his studio sound system. Seems like a good way to go and should also work when adding digital file management to an older system.

My own system is rather old and patched together. In my office/studio I listen on a pair of Tannoy speakers, powered by a Bryston amp rescued from the Santa Fe studio and an Adcom preamp. All of this stuff is more than 25 years old. There is a Sony CD player, model X707ES and also from the old studio, but most of my listening is done by playing files on my laptop hooked up to the MixPre-6 from Sound Devices. I am ashamed to admit that I am using the mini-stereo headphone output of the MixPre-6 to connect it to the Adcom preamp. Hey, it works! :-)

What would you recommend to Doc?

There is nothing you can see that is not a flower;
there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.

― Matsuo Basho

I listened to a podcast with Demis Hassabis (LINK) about AlphaFold (and AlphaGo and AlphaZero).

Check out his wikipedia entry:

Hassabis was born to a Greek Cypriot father and a Chinese Singaporean mother and grew up in North London. A child prodigy in chess from the age of 4, Hassabis reached master standard at the age of 13 with an Elo rating of 2300 and captained many of the England junior chess teams. He represented the University of Cambridge in the Oxford-Cambridge varsity chess matches of 1995, 1996 and 1997, winning a half blue.

The entire conversation was very interesting but here is something that stuck out for me. AlphaGo was trained with data from thousands of documented games made by human players. Go has a more than thousand year history so there was lots of data available.

Later AlphaZero learned to play Go on its own, without data from human players. And then something interesting happened. It defeated the world champion Go player and in doing that its move #37 became famous. That move was unusual and Go players said that they had been taught NOT to make such a move early in the game. They were taught not to play it. Presumably AlphaGo would not have made this move because human players do not to make this move. But AlphaZero was able to arrive at this move unencumbered by that. 

Here is where it becomes interesting. Now human players are examining many moves they learned NOT to make, in order to see whether they *could* be good moves after all. 

The current of the flowing river does not cease, and yet the water is not the same water as before. The foam that floats on stagnant pools, now vanishing, now forming, never stays the same for long. So, too, it is with the people and dwellings of the world.

Kamo no Chomei (12th century)