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Linux Ubuntu 19.04 full install on USB stick - fix UEFI/Grub

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Even better reads: Data Consistency in Distributed System - CAP, PACELC My  Secular Philosophy - Life, God, Knowledge, Morality, Ethics This blog is mainly focused on my Philosophical and theoretical ideas. From time to time I have practical posts that are too few to deserve a blog by themselves. I still hope my other work (like above) is even more valuable than such practical article as below. * * * This article explains how to install Ubuntu 19.04 or similar on USB+UEFI, like you would do it on a hard drive. Regular USB install will likely fail, you need the fix below. Ubuntu installer has a bug when installing on USB using a PC that already has an UEFI boot system (like Windows 10). Such thumb-drive is not only persistent, you can also do regular updates on it, customize the programs, repair the file-system. This is more than just a live "USB Pen Drive Linux" with persistence, it is your full Linux system in your pocket. Only (U)EFI boot is covered here, but most recen...

Linux Grub/UEFI boot system - introduction / howto for Ubuntu 19.04

Better read:  Data Consistency in Distributed System - CAP, PACELC This blog is mainly focused on my Philosophical and theoretical ideas. From time to time I have practical posts that are too few to deserve a blog by themselves. I still hope my other work (like above) is even more valuable than such practical article as below. * * * On short : in order to Boot Linux in UEFI mode: UEFI loads Grub and a minimal grub.cfg from a fat32/EFI partition. Ubuntu uses 2 directories: EFI/Boot and EFI/ubuntu Grub detects the root partition (via UUID) and loads the kernel and initrd from that Linux/ext4 partition. In Ubuntu, the minimal grub.cfg calls another grub.cfg from the ext4 partition - containing boot menu. More details

On Mindfulness

I will approach mindfulness from an informational perspective, adding just a little brain physiology. If you already know about mindfulness, you can directly skip to " The heresy" Introduction As many subjects that I approach in this blog, my knowledge about the subject is at hobby level, maybe a little more than the average guy. One of my childhood dreams was to discover something really new. The strategy that I considered then was to start on that subject without all the prejudice from the previous research done in that domain. I realize now that it is merely impossible to innovate something without having in mind the prior results and mistakes done on that study field. However, I still hope that one can derive new perspectives in a domain by combining common knowledge from various domains. With that said, here is a little essay about how and why mindfulness might  be working for humans. This might depart sometimes from the mainstream conception on mindfulness and ...

How can we all be right even when we believe incompatible things

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Reality is pretty complex, alright... Normally we expect reality to be far more complex than we can comprehend in a limited human mind. Each time we look to one object, many other objects go outside our perception field, even if the eye can still see them. And this is OK, because we have only a limited processing brain power for perceiving the reality. It's not only the limit of perceiving reality, there is also a limit in our capacity of "knowing" about reality. If we think about it, it is very intuitive: the physical mind is far smaller than the reality we want to know about. In order to know about reality, we need to have a model about reality stored inside our minds.

Speculation on cancer

We know that cancer is when some human cells are multiplying very fast and then spread all over the organism. The are many substances that seems to be "cancerigenic". However, recently we started to link some cancers to bacterial or viral infections. What is more probable: that a chemical substance makes a cell to multiply and spread, or some viral/bacterial DNA is reprogramming cells to multiply and spread?

Life is very compressible

An information representation (or string) s  is very compressible if the size of it's smallest possible compression K(s) is very small compared with it's observed size(s) . The smallest compression size  K(s)  is the Kolmogorov complexity . We can define the compress-ibility C(s) of a string s  to be the smallest compression  K(s)  divided by the size of the original representation  size(s) : C(s) = K(s) / Size(s) - lower is better The smallest compressed size" for any given string is a function that cannot be calculated in general, however you can always find an upper bound to it as soon as you find a compression of that size. A compression of s is basically a program along with it's input that can generate s as output. If is always possible to find a program slightly bigger than s  (think: print " s "), therefore it is only interesting to find compression with size that is lower than size( s ).

On Philosophy - essay

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  One philosopher said that "philosophy is a natural act of human living" and I agree with him. But what brings philosophy in addition to "regular" science"? I find Philosophy to be a kind of "meta-science", permanently inquiring about the root of all assumptions that we use. In this way, Philosophy is different than "regular" science, however it can contributes to the methods used in all the rest of the science. By analyzing the limits of our knowledge, we can better understand what level of certainty we can expect from science and the rest of our knowledge and believes. Of course, by using specific methods and logical deduction in assuring coherency, Philosophy is also a science in itself.