Life on Andres Marrugo

Nothing Besides Remains

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 23:12:00 -0500

There would come a time when future researchers would contemplate his work as obsolete and irrelevant.

Life immutable

Sat, 10 Oct 2015 22:34:00 -0500

Life should always be like this. Inmutable.

In Praise of Slow

Fri, 07 Aug 2015 23:53:00 -0500

I have a recurrent discussion with my wife.

She likes to do most things as fast as possible.

I like to pause and think about things, and do them often slowly. At my pace.

I think that if you do things too quickly you might not be fully aware of what you’re doing.

You might feel that you are not really in charge of your life.

You might feel that you can’t really remember things truly.

On (re)learning things

Thu, 29 Jan 2015 22:47:00 -0500

My favorite topic in an introductory differential equations course is mechanical and electrical vibrations. I enjoyed learning about it as a student and I enjoyed teaching it later. (Or more accurately, I enjoyed being exposed to it as a student and really learning it later when I had to teach it.)

John D. Cook on Mechanical vibrations

I’ve always thought that education is about learning, as much as parenting is about maturing and growing up. On the parenting side, you can’t really teach your kids how to live – you can’t even imagine the kind of world they will have to live from the time they’re born – but you can expose them to the best things you know. In doing so, they can at least have the chance to form an opinion on the many matters of life, they’ll surely make mistakes, but I bet they won’t regret much.

Not Collapsing the Wave Function

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 09:32:00 -0500

Today in “This American Life” I was listening to an episode about hidden truths. It was really interesting to find out about a secret letter that the prime minister of Britain writes to every commander of a nuclear submarine. It supposedly contains instructions on what to do if the nation has been wiped out and if the commander should retaliate or not. It poses a mystery on what the contents are, even more so because every time there’s a new prime minister in office the letters are destroyed unread.

The Perils of Talking Too Much

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 22:07:00 -0500

photo credit: mkorsakov via photopin cc

All too often I see people who simply talk too much.¹ Wether what they speak is nonsense or even meaningful things, there’s a limit to how much one can tolerate.

By talking too much – and too often – we miss out on many things. We don’t let others speak (which to my understanding is common courtesy), and worse of all we lose our capacity to empathize with others. We can’t read faces well while uttering words out of our mouths continuously. Loosing that feedback is what prompts us to speak without pause and with no care for what the people around us may feel. It’s what turns you into a prick. We’re just too focused on ourselves to care about others.

New Secularism

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:48:00 -0500

photo credit: Pablo Moroe via photopin cc.

Before Darwin it certainly was very difficult to be an atheist or a nonbeliever – that is, an intellectually fulfilled one.¹ At least that’s how Richard Dawkins usually puts it and I quite agree with him. It was not that the scientific method² didn’t exist at the time, it was that the mystery of life was too big a mystery to even consider tackling through the ways of science. Yet that was what Darwin did.

A Book for my Son

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 21:21:00 -0500

In the latest Generational podcast episode Aaron Hillegass told Gabe that he wrote his Objective-C book with his ten-year-old in mind.

I found this to be quite interesting and truly inspiring. By writing the book “for his son,” he made sure anyone could actually read and understand it, but also he was deeply motivated to get it right. I wouldn’t want my son to read a crappy book.

A Brave New World: The joy of discovery

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:44:00 -0500

This post is in fact a Day One entry. I treat my Day One journal as a sort of personal blog. A blog with a readership of one – at least in the present. What I mean to say is that, for the most part, I write about my life and for my kids, which are too young to read. I hope they read this in some distant future. I think that the things I might forget are probably the things they’ll want to know about. That is why I write.

Writing my thoughts down

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:52:00 -0500

photo credit: chiarashine via photopin cc

As is often the case, ideas come about in the most unexpected moments. Lately, I’ve found myself taking notes while walking to work, while waiting for a coffee in front of a bending machine, or like now while getting dressed for work.

It’s become a habit of mine to write what I think, when I think it. My iPod touch has enabled that. I could well have pen and paper with me at all times, but I’m not used to that and nothing beats the digital format.

'Cooking' Ideas

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 21:02:00 -0500

I love to cook – or one of the reasons I enjoy it so much is – because it’s a manual activity that, quite often, lets my mind wonder about. While cooking I can think about my problems,¹ about the future, about a world different from this one. I can hear my thoughts in a undisturbed way. It is like a moment of pristine inspiration. Me and myself. Nobody else.

Four Paragraphs Long

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 23:37:00 -0500

I don’t really know what this post is about or even why I decided it should be blog post in the first place. All I can think is that I really liked it. I thought it would be interesting to share it with others. Not that it would be useful or anything, simply a pleasant read.

It’s not meant to mean anything in particular – at least in any philosophical way. It’s just something I conjured up the other day before going to bed. After I read it a couple of times, I knew it was a true gem. Only four paragraphs long, yet so deep with frustration and love. The love of a father towards his son, and of those little – apparently insignificant – moments that stick with you for the rest of your life. Here it is.

Always Late to The Party

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:11:00 -0500

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

It always seems I’m late to the party. For several years I pondered on the idea of joining Twitter, but it never really made much sense to me – at least at the time – to join a social network where there were hardly any friends of mine¹. Big mistake, that actually is one of the cool things about twitter. Unlike Facebook, it does provides an open space suitable for engaging in discussions, albeit short, of all sorts with interesting people who don’t really have to be your “friend.”

It turns out that shortly after joining twitter most people² were already considering abandoning it in favor of App.net. For the time being App.net seems like a niche thing, and most people seem to continue on twitter. Whether that stays that way for the next year or so depends on twitter and their recent policy changes that could well endanger the platform as we know it today.

I'm writing the site I want to read

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 23:32:00 -0500

photo by striatic.

If there’s something I learned from the famous talk “149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!” by John Gruber and Merlin Mann, was that one should make a great effort to write as if the people you admire we’re going to read your work. This is true even if the people you admire are fictional, or like in Gruber’s case, an idealized version of himself. I like to think that this piece of advice is as valid for writing/blogging as it is for anything else you do in life.

On the human intellect and prehistoric people

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 17:53:00 -0500

photo by JackVersloot.

I recently finished reading “The Clan of the Cave Bear” by Jean M. Auel. It is a beautiful story of the human struggle for survival. In the time of mammoths and cave lions, a young human girl finds herself orphan because of an earthquake. Her survival instincts are put to test at their maximum, but she knows very little of surviving on her own. This desolate picture changes when she is rescued by a group of Neanderthals, the “clan of the cave bear”. She looks like them a bit, but at the same time she is too different to be accepted without it raising a few concerns.

Doing nice things

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 23:57:00 -0500

I wrote this roughly over a month ago, but by now it kind of feels like ages; don’t know why. I’ve tried–without much success–to catch up on old episodes of the back to work podcast¹, this is something inspired by one of these episodes.

Why I care about blogging

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 15:47:00 -0500

photo by Mike Licht.

It’s been about two and a half years since I started blogging. It was on a blog called Between the Candle and the Star (BTCATS) which I still keep, but feel I’ll be leaving aside indefinitely¹, and continue my writing on this site.

My original intention with BTCATS was to have a place were to write about something I had managed to solve or fix so it could be helpful to others. The blog has moderately met this goal. However, on the first year or so, I barely published a handful of posts. About a year ago, shortly after my son was born, things started to get interesting.