Nature of the body
Today I want to reflect on the following quote from The Meditations:
Whatever this is that I am, it is flesh and a little spirit and an intelligence. Throw away your books; stop letting yourself be distracted. That is not allowed. Instead, as if you were dying right now, despise your flesh. A mess of blood, pieces of bone, a woven tangle of nerves, veins, arteries. Consider what the spirit is: air, and never the same air, but vomited out and gulped in again every instant. Finally, the intelligence. Think of it this way: You are an old man. Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses, to kick against fate and the present, and to mistrust the future.
At one point Marcus describes the human body as rotting meat in a bag. Ouch. I wouldn't go so far as to disdain my body. But for me this passage is a reminder to not let my body's selfish impulses take over. Like eating an extra donut.
Articles
Personal notes I've written over the years.
- When does the Binomial become approximately Normal
- Gambler's ruin problem
- The t-distribution becomes Normal as n increases
- Marcus Aurelius on death
- Proof of the Central Limit Theorem
- Proof of the Strong Law of Large Numbers
- Deriving Multiple Linear Regression
- Safety stock formula derivation
- Derivation of the Normal Distribution
- Comparing means of Normal populations
- Concentrate like a Roman
- How to read a Regression summary in R
- Notes on Expected Value
- How to read an ANOVA summary in R
- The time I lost faith in Expected Value
- Notes on Weighted Linear Regression
- How information can update Conditional Probability
- Coupon collecting singeltons with equal probability
- Coupon collecting with n pulls and different probabilities
- Coupon collecting with different probabilities
- Coupon collecting with equal probability
- Adding Independent Normals Is Normal
- The value of fame during and after life
- Notes on the Beta Distribution
- Notes on the Gamma distribution
- Notes on Conditioning
- Notes on Independence
- A part of society
- Conditional Expectation and Prediction
- Notes on Covariance
- Deriving Simple Linear Regression
- Nature of the body
- Set Theory Basics
- Polynomial Regression
- The Negative Hyper Geometric RV
- Notes on the MVN
- Deriving the Cauchy density function
- Exponential and Geometric relationship
- Joint Distribution of Functions of RVs
- Order Statistics
- The Sample Mean and Sample Variance
- Probability that one RV is greater than another
- St Petersburg Paradox
- Drunk guy by a cliff
- The things that happen to us